James Caird (politician)


Sir James Caird was a Scottish agricultural writer and politician.

Life

Born at Stranraer, the son of James Caird and Isabella McNeil, Caird was educated at Edinburgh High School and University of Edinburgh.
He was Member of Parliament for Dartmouth from 1857–59 and for Stirling Burghs from 1859–65.
He was a free-trade farmer. In 1849, he wrote High Farming as the best Substitute for Protection. In 1850 he wrote The Plantation Scheme: Or, the West of Ireland as a Field of Investment.
He toured America, and Canada.
He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1865, President of the Royal Statistical Society, 1880-2 and was made a Privy Counsellor in 1889. Caird travelled to India from October 1878 to join a commission of famine inspectors. He held opinions that the Indian administrators did not appreciate. He was of the opinion that famine relief should be aimed to save life and was against fitness tests and wage payment against work for Indians. He believed that Indian governance needed fundamental change with peasants receiving payment in kind with handling of harvest variability. He even considered that land revenue superstructure including the Indian Civil Services needed pruning or even abolition. He was senior member of the Land Commission in 1882. He was director of the land department of the Board of Agriculture from 1889–91.
He was appointed a CB in 1869 and promoted to KCB in 1882.

Works