Glossary on the Republic

Boycott

Movement

It is the only protest tactic named after the man it was used against. And it worked so well it drove him out of the country.

In 1880, in County Mayo, Ireland, a retired English army captain named Charles Cunningham Boycott managed land for an absentee lord. After a bad harvest, the tenant farmers asked for lower rents. Boycott refused and moved to evict eleven families.

The Irish Land League, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, had a new idea for fighting back without violence. Rather than attack the man, they would simply erase him. As Parnell put it, isolate him as if he were a leper of old.

It was total. Boycott's farm workers walked off. His house servants left. The shops in town would not serve him, the blacksmith would not shoe his horse, even the postman stopped delivering his mail. A local priest, Father John O'Malley, is credited with picking the word, because he thought ostracise would mean nothing to ordinary farmers. So they used the captain's name instead.

Boycott was trapped. To save his harvest he had to import fifty outside laborers, guarded by a thousand soldiers and police. It reportedly cost far more to bring in the crop than the crop was worth. Humiliated, he fled to England, and his name entered the language for good.

Origin

From Captain Charles Boycott, ostracized in Ireland in 1880; the word was coined to replace ostracise.

Why it matters

Within months, boycott was being used in newspapers around the world. The tactic of collective, peaceful refusal became one of the most powerful tools ordinary people have, from Montgomery to grape fields to global movements. A landlord who would not lower the rent gave protest its most enduring weapon, and lent it his name forever.