I very recently learned that the term “boycott” comes from someone’s actual name: Charles Boycott. Boycott was an English land agent who tried, in 1880, to collect unpayable rents from Irish peasants on behalf of an English aristocrat landlord. When he failed to collect the rents, he tried evicting the tenants. The Irish Land League responded with a campaign to ignore Boycott’s orders and isolate him socially and economically.

They not only ignored his eviction orders and threw manure at his process servers, but refused to deliver his mail or sell him food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

It was pretty effective—the British government eventually had to deploy a thousand soldiers (naturally, because the state works for the propertied class and none more than the 19th century British state) at a cost of some £10,000 to harvest £500 worth of crops. Boycott had to be evacuated by the soldiers, who even had to drive him out, as no locals would agree to drive his carriage out of the region.

Imagine being cancelled so hard that your name becomes permanently associated with getting cancelled.

Charles Boycott - Wikipedia

@HeavenlyPossum except that boycott and cancelling are two different things, even if they might seem similar on some aspects. Cancelling is a form of ostracism from a group or movment, usually for lack of ideological purity and therefore for being "problematic". It rarely goes beyond the movement's circles itself. Boycott is the act of refusing to trade with someone as a mean to protest against them, it can be wide-spread, and is not irreversible, contrary to cancelling.

@ariane @HeavenlyPossum it was far more than refusing to trade in the original instance.

It was complete social ostracisation - even physically turned your back on anyone providing support of any means (social or trade) to them.

@DToher @HeavenlyPossum Except that, as you said, the lord in question had the full backup of the State authorities and the army. It's not exactly full ostracisation. Actually, it was more of a rebellion from people who were at his service and below his social class. He wasn't ostracised by those of his class and above.
@ariane @DToher @HeavenlyPossum The Land League was a political organisation which agitated for rights and land ownership for tenant farmers. Some of its leaders would have been socially equal or above Boycott. As @DToher says people of the same class who were brought in to break the boycott were ostracised by the locals, as were those who continued to pay rent. It's all much more complex than just a few locals rebelling against a local landlord.
@Bernadette_BookNanny @DToher @HeavenlyPossum That still doesn't mean that boycott can be equated with cancelling. If it was the same, then, we would only be talking about boycott, not cancelling.. Being cancelled means having one's closest relationships definitely turning their back on you and treating you like you have a contagious diseases and demanding everyone else to do the same, or risk being treated the same way.
@ariane @DToher @HeavenlyPossum That's exactly what happened to the locals in Mayo & those who tried to break the boycott. How do you think the boycott succeeded? The situation was more complex & far-reaching within Irish history than just a bunch of locals standing up to a land agent. The definition of 'cancel' in Oxford Dictionaries is to 'publicly boycott ... for promoting beliefs...' So the terms are linked. You've chosen a more specific definition.
@ariane @Bernadette_BookNanny @DToher @HeavenlyPossum That sounds like the practice of shunning which the Amish do to people who leave their community.