Engels rejected naturalizing Ireland’s poverty as a geographic inevitability.

Evidence

Engels had occasion to take on “the Irish landowners and the English bourgeois” who saw the condition of Ireland in the nineteenth century as a natural phenomenon: “Compared with England, Ireland is more suited to cattle-rearing on the whole; but if England is compared with France, she too is more suited to cattle-rearing. Are we to conclude that the whole of England should be transformed into cattle pastures, and the whole agricultural population be sent into the factory towns or to America?” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1589