A boycott is a coordinated action against a business or other provider of goods and services, in which participants who would usually conduct business with the target refuse to do so; the term can be more widely applied to mean any coordinated refusal of cooperation or participation.
Though boycotts go as far back as the late 18th century as a tactic of abolitionism, the namesake boycott was coordinated in 1880 during the Irish Land War against Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, an English-born agent of an absentee landlord. Boycott is a classic case of constantly falling forward via the relentless push of money. He joined the infantry as a young man, after flunking out of the Royal military academy, when his family bought a commission for him for the equivalent of £50,000 in today’s money. After he sold off his military commission, he spent inheritance money to lease a large area of farmland on Achill Island and build himself a house there. Some two decades later, Boycott was hired as the agent and tax collector for Lough Mask House in County Mayo by the third Earl of Erne, who had land holdings all over Ireland and lived in Crom Castle, near what is now the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This was common practice at the time, but giving the position to someone who was already imbued with such an essentialist mindset about his wealth and status as Boycott’s was far from good practice. Boycott set to work finding any way to fine the tenant farmers for any petty infraction he could dream up, while taking away any perk that might have value to them.
Irish farmers had been organizing since the 1850s around a campaign of rent control, eviction protection for tenants who were in good standing, and the ability to sell interests in farm plots freely and without landlord interference. With assistance from groups working toward Irish independence, this movement led to the formation of Land Leagues in County Mayo and across Ireland as a whole. When Boycott moved to evict eleven tenants around Lough Mask due to a dispute over rents, the Land League advocated for a complete shunning of all contact with and work for Boycott rather than a violent confrontation. Possibly under threat from the Land League and the tenants, the entire area abandoned all contact with Boycott: All the servants on the Lough Mask House estate departed; the postmistress refused to deliver mail; the blacksmith and shopkeepers refused to sell him goods or food; and the farmers and laborers on the estate lands refused to harvest.
Though the local leader of the Land League, Father John O’Malley, was primarily responsible for attaching Boycott’s name to this event, Boycott did himself no favors by complaining about his situation in a letter to the Times. This sparked a series of correspondent reports and letters in the major newspapers across London, Belfast, and Dublin, and culminated in a call for financing a fund to save Boycott’s crops. In the end, a small number of scab workers from other counties and a large police and military detail were brought in, costing an estimated £10,000 to save a £500 harvest (in 1880 money). Boycott departed for England in November of 1880, and after a visit to New York and Virginia, lived out his days as a land agent in Suffolk but still took vacation in Ireland.
Meanwhile, the boycott phenomenon spread immediately, and several other tenancies in Ireland put it to good effect in 1880. The Land League leaders were acquitted in a conspiracy trial early in 1881, but consequent legislation in Parliament was mixed: the boycotts led to both the Coercion Act — which detained close to 1000 people connected to the Land League — and the Land Law (Ireland) Act — which enacted the Land League’s three main goals as law.