Boycott: The Strange History of a Word

 Most of us are familiar with the word "boycott." We know that it means to shun or ostracize someone or something, refuse to patronise a business or an establishment, to purchase a product, or something of the sort. It is used as a verb or a noun, "to boycott" or "a boycott." [Image: Civil Rights Boycotts in US South, 1950s]

But how many of us know the origins of the word? "Boycott" is actually a fairly recent addition to the English language, first used about 160 years ago. It came from Ireland, then a part of the UK. 

The word comes from an act of protest and punishment against a particular person, Captain Charles Boycott. He was a retired army officer who had become the land agent of an absentee Anglo-Irish landlord, Lord Erne, in County Mayo. [Image: Captain Boycott, as Drawn by Spy (Lesley Ward) in Vanity Fair, 1881]

In 1880, Boycott became the focus of a coordinated protest by activists of the Irish Land League, instigated by the league's founder, Michael Davitt, and its leader, Charles Stuart Parnell, MP. Davitt himself was from County Mayo. [Images: Parnell and Davitt]

Davitt had established the Land League in 1879 to protect tenant farmers against oppressions by large landowners, notably arbitrary evictions and rack renting (raising rents excessively). The League campaigned to secure what it called the Three Fs: Free Sale, Fixity of Tenure, and Fair Rents. 

In pursuit of these goals, and specifically to prevent planned evictions on Lord Erne's estate, League activists urged estate workers, including seasonal crop harvesters, to refuse their labor. The protest quickly evolved into a community-wide movement designed to isolate Boycott, the land agent on the spot. 

Shops and tradesmen in the nearby town of Ballinrobe refused to serve him or do business with him. (The League coerced some of them into participating.) In short, his life became unbearable.

News of Boycott's predicament soon spread to London. The government sent a regiment of Royal Hussars (light cavalry) and over 1000 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary to protect volunteer harvesters, mostly Protestant Orangemen. They managed to harvest about £500 of crops -- at a cost to the British government of about £10,000 (millions in today's money). 

Boycott left Ireland after the harvest and took a job as an estate agent in Suffolk, England. He died in 1897. The Boycott affair was widely followed and reported and people began using the word "boycott" to describe similar protest actions. 

A poster promoting Parnell's pamphlet "Boycotting" shows that it quickly became an eponymous word. Parnell is pictured on the cover.

According to one source, "boycott" was first coined by a local priest, Father John O'Malley, who was helping an activist to find a simple term for the action the local people would understand. He rejected "ostracism," and "social excommunication" as too elitist. and suggested calling it "to boycott him."