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Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster
In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.
In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism.
Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.
In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.
In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism.
Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published March 11, 2025
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March 8, 2025
The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1851) devastated Ireland, resulting in over one million famine-related deaths and the emigration of over 1.5 million people to places like America, Britain, and Australia. Meanwhile, Britain, located just across the Irish Sea, prospered. Listening to my late uncles tell it, this was cold-hearted, premeditated murder.
The potato blight in Ireland was caused by the water mold "Phytophthora infestans," brought over from North America. The potato crop was essential to Ireland, both for sustenance and economic stability, and the blight had cataclysmic consequences. Absentee landlords found it profitable to evict people from land they could no longer afford to rent. “Unroofing houses” was a common practice, where cottage walls and roofs were torn down or burned in order to enforce the expulsion. Scores of people had to live on the side of the road or in makeshift lean-tos, begging or stealing to avoid starvation. For many, the only option left was to leave Ireland on overcrowded "coffin ships."
Padraic X. Scanlan’s book, “Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine,” investigates the origins of the devastating Irish Famine. The disaster was not caused by a lack of food, as Ireland exported vast quantities of grain, meat, and dairy—more than enough to feed its starving population. Moreover, these exports were sold at very low prices set by the British– barely enough to cover rent for most. Combined with the potato blight, the British policy of laissez-faire—the idea that the economy should be left to self-regulate—worsened the effects of the famine.
There were efforts to help, as this was a world-wide embarrassment. Soup kitchens and workhouses were established, yet the aid was conditional. The Whig Party insisted that relief be tied to labor requirements as the Irish would take the charity and never pivot to improving their situation.
There are so many quotations by British leaders showing an utter disdain for the Irish. Initially, many believed the Irish were exaggerating their poverty. “Britain was industrious, Ireland was lazy.” An ugly belief was espoused over and over, that the famine was doing its job. The economist Thomas Robert Malthus said that nature, in such a crisis, would restore the balance between population and food supply through “famine… the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.” “The Irish, he concluded, could not yet be taught; until they starved, they would not learn.”
As the famine continued, and one policy after another did little to resolve the disorder and desolation, many in the government became nihilistic, arguing that it would be better to do nothing to slow the famine or palliate the suffering of the Irish poor—to “let the evil work itself out like a consuming fire.” Ireland was not the only country to suffer from Britain’s laissez-faire belief. India lost tens of millions of lives in repeated droughts and famines. Here again, authorities “...convinced themselves that overly heroic exertions against the natural laws of the economy were worse than no effort at all.”
“Rot” shows that while the Irish Famine was not caused by the British, their mishandling of it was due to misplaced faith in the market and an age-old mistrust of the intelligence and character of the Irish. The suffering described was horrific and would not have been tolerated or addressed in the same manner in Britain.
Thank you to Basic Books and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #Rot #NetGalley
The potato blight in Ireland was caused by the water mold "Phytophthora infestans," brought over from North America. The potato crop was essential to Ireland, both for sustenance and economic stability, and the blight had cataclysmic consequences. Absentee landlords found it profitable to evict people from land they could no longer afford to rent. “Unroofing houses” was a common practice, where cottage walls and roofs were torn down or burned in order to enforce the expulsion. Scores of people had to live on the side of the road or in makeshift lean-tos, begging or stealing to avoid starvation. For many, the only option left was to leave Ireland on overcrowded "coffin ships."
Padraic X. Scanlan’s book, “Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine,” investigates the origins of the devastating Irish Famine. The disaster was not caused by a lack of food, as Ireland exported vast quantities of grain, meat, and dairy—more than enough to feed its starving population. Moreover, these exports were sold at very low prices set by the British– barely enough to cover rent for most. Combined with the potato blight, the British policy of laissez-faire—the idea that the economy should be left to self-regulate—worsened the effects of the famine.
There were efforts to help, as this was a world-wide embarrassment. Soup kitchens and workhouses were established, yet the aid was conditional. The Whig Party insisted that relief be tied to labor requirements as the Irish would take the charity and never pivot to improving their situation.
There are so many quotations by British leaders showing an utter disdain for the Irish. Initially, many believed the Irish were exaggerating their poverty. “Britain was industrious, Ireland was lazy.” An ugly belief was espoused over and over, that the famine was doing its job. The economist Thomas Robert Malthus said that nature, in such a crisis, would restore the balance between population and food supply through “famine… the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.” “The Irish, he concluded, could not yet be taught; until they starved, they would not learn.”
As the famine continued, and one policy after another did little to resolve the disorder and desolation, many in the government became nihilistic, arguing that it would be better to do nothing to slow the famine or palliate the suffering of the Irish poor—to “let the evil work itself out like a consuming fire.” Ireland was not the only country to suffer from Britain’s laissez-faire belief. India lost tens of millions of lives in repeated droughts and famines. Here again, authorities “...convinced themselves that overly heroic exertions against the natural laws of the economy were worse than no effort at all.”
“Rot” shows that while the Irish Famine was not caused by the British, their mishandling of it was due to misplaced faith in the market and an age-old mistrust of the intelligence and character of the Irish. The suffering described was horrific and would not have been tolerated or addressed in the same manner in Britain.
Thank you to Basic Books and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #Rot #NetGalley
March 20, 2025
Just finished:
New York: Basic Books, 2025.
A poignant book about one of the worst ecological disasters of the 19th century. While the biological cause of the famine was a fungus that destroyed healthy potato crop, it was a political and economic disaster.
Ireland was always an unequal partner within the United Kingdom (one reason Ireland was "United" with Great Britain was to prevent the French from using the Emerald Isle as a base to invade England).
Coupled with the fact that Ireland was a colony of the British in terms of providing it with grain and pigs, Ireland was a powder keg waiting to happen.
This wasn't the first time that the potato crop faced disease. However, this lasted five years. The British government responded by importing maize from the United States (not popular with the Irish and not grown in Britain), to establishing poor houses. The British believed that Ireland needed to modernized with the markets and was backwards (ironically the Irish condition was modern).
An estimated million people tied from starvation or complications of illness and starvation and another million left the island.
I think he should have said more about the blight in the early 1740s that killed proportionally more Irish than the more famous blight.
While I thought this book was dry in places, it was very eye opening.
New York: Basic Books, 2025.
A poignant book about one of the worst ecological disasters of the 19th century. While the biological cause of the famine was a fungus that destroyed healthy potato crop, it was a political and economic disaster.
Ireland was always an unequal partner within the United Kingdom (one reason Ireland was "United" with Great Britain was to prevent the French from using the Emerald Isle as a base to invade England).
Coupled with the fact that Ireland was a colony of the British in terms of providing it with grain and pigs, Ireland was a powder keg waiting to happen.
This wasn't the first time that the potato crop faced disease. However, this lasted five years. The British government responded by importing maize from the United States (not popular with the Irish and not grown in Britain), to establishing poor houses. The British believed that Ireland needed to modernized with the markets and was backwards (ironically the Irish condition was modern).
An estimated million people tied from starvation or complications of illness and starvation and another million left the island.
I think he should have said more about the blight in the early 1740s that killed proportionally more Irish than the more famous blight.
While I thought this book was dry in places, it was very eye opening.
December 3, 2024
Whenever I review a book about Irish history, I feel the need to supply the following context: I am an American of Irish heritage. I am not a scholar on Irish History or Ireland generally. I think I can be categorized as “self-taught”. Irish history was not on the curriculum in most public schools in the US. Over several decades, I’ve read some books on Irish history with great interest and desire to retain what I learned, but I did not read in any organized or systematic way. I have read a few books about the Famine when the books captured my attention or, as in this case, were offered to me for free to review.
I have not done a comprehensive review of the historiography of the Potato Famine, but it seems like, by the 21st century, those interested in the topic have reached the consensus that the Famine was a case of colossal bungling by the British imperial overlords. This book agrees. It says:
One particularly British aspect, seemingly unique at the time of the famine but not in our own time, is the slavish adherence to the principles of the free market economy and the ideas that supplement or derive from these principles. Of these supplementary ideas, I refer specifically to the idea that “generosity was a moral hazard” (l. 316), which has a major supporting role in this book. As it applies here, it meant that you could not simply give people aid without expecting work in return, because then you would create a race of irresponsible slackers. This idea doesn’t sound too unreasonable on its face, but the results of England’s strenuous efforts to avoid moral hazard included the creation of a cumbersome bureaucracy administering byzantine procedures, all with the target of ensuring that only the deserving received aid.
(In addition, because it was necessary to make the Irish break big rocks into little rocks to show them that they wouldn't get government aid for free, the British government had to actually import rocks from elsewhere, because there weren't enough big rocks lying around Ireland to morally improve all the Irish who were in need of improvement.)
A second particularly British aspect, connected with the first above, was the air of superiority with which the British approached the Irish, their culture, and their history. While I don’t think a colonizer ever felt otherwise than superior to the colonized, there’s something particular about the English and Irish, due to their long mutual history and physical proximity. The English were able to cultivate a complex backstory to their sense of superiority, not just the normal colonizer idea that the colonized were primitive, but also other ideas, like the idea that potatoes an ancient feature of Irish culture, when in fact they only arrived many years after the Columbian Exchange introduced them to Europe.
A quibble: at location 1189, the author says that “the idea that economies evolved from barter to money to credit is a myth”. In support of this contention, the author cites the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. I have listened to Debt as an unabridged audiobook. It did not convince me completely. I've also read a lot of seemingly valid criticism online from economists who dispute Graeber’s contentions. I think that the word “myth” as used here is not really correct. Better: the idea is unproven, or (more wordy) a matter of debate.
Here are some quotes that I found interesting:
“Ireland before the famine, however, more closely resembled capitalism’s future than its past …. The staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potatoes failed” (l. 462).
“... samples from European potatoes preserved from the 1840s show that every sample’s genetic code contains a distinctive haplotype – an inheritable and distinct group of chromosomes, used by geneticists to trace lineages – tracked to the Toluca Valley in Mexico, where potatoes grow wild. Incredibly, this means that the European late-blight pandemic might have been caused by the arrival of a single blighted cargo of potatoes, or even just one blighted potato or preserved spore that then cloned itself by the quadrillions” (l. 2027).
“Some traditionalist Tories even considered the blight to be a hoax, perpetrated by the Whigs and Repealers to discredit or destroy the Union” (l. 2249).
“It was among the first international humanitarian crises to be widely publicised in newspapers worldwide and among the first to anchor a global fundraising effort” (l. 3138).
“The Famine was a crisis of ideas as well as policy – not a crisis of a lack of ideas, but of the implementation of an orthodoxy of ill-considered ideas, proven unfit for purpose in practice” (l. 4058).
The final sentence of this book:
“When the system functioned, it was civilisation. When it broke down, it was Providence” (l. 4143).
In summary, a good book for the interested non-expert historian with a clearly stated, understandable, and well-documented thesis.
I received an advance review copy of this book, electronically, for free, from the publisher via Netgalley.
I have not done a comprehensive review of the historiography of the Potato Famine, but it seems like, by the 21st century, those interested in the topic have reached the consensus that the Famine was a case of colossal bungling by the British imperial overlords. This book agrees. It says:
The blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields and vulnerable plants. But the famine – a complex ecological, economic, logistic, and political disaster – was a consequence of colonialism. (Kindle location 121)Perhaps I am nickpicking here, but I felt that colonialism (while responsible for quite a lot of misery) cannot, by itself, receive all of the blame for the needless deaths of perhaps a million people. I think that this book shows that the fiasco of the pandemic response is a result of a particular kind of colonialism, that is, British colonialism. It might be an interesting thought experiment to posit an alternate universe in which Ireland was a French, or a Spanish, colony (unlikely, I know, but it's only a thought experiment). Would the result have been any different? Less tragic? More tragic?
One particularly British aspect, seemingly unique at the time of the famine but not in our own time, is the slavish adherence to the principles of the free market economy and the ideas that supplement or derive from these principles. Of these supplementary ideas, I refer specifically to the idea that “generosity was a moral hazard” (l. 316), which has a major supporting role in this book. As it applies here, it meant that you could not simply give people aid without expecting work in return, because then you would create a race of irresponsible slackers. This idea doesn’t sound too unreasonable on its face, but the results of England’s strenuous efforts to avoid moral hazard included the creation of a cumbersome bureaucracy administering byzantine procedures, all with the target of ensuring that only the deserving received aid.
(In addition, because it was necessary to make the Irish break big rocks into little rocks to show them that they wouldn't get government aid for free, the British government had to actually import rocks from elsewhere, because there weren't enough big rocks lying around Ireland to morally improve all the Irish who were in need of improvement.)
A second particularly British aspect, connected with the first above, was the air of superiority with which the British approached the Irish, their culture, and their history. While I don’t think a colonizer ever felt otherwise than superior to the colonized, there’s something particular about the English and Irish, due to their long mutual history and physical proximity. The English were able to cultivate a complex backstory to their sense of superiority, not just the normal colonizer idea that the colonized were primitive, but also other ideas, like the idea that potatoes an ancient feature of Irish culture, when in fact they only arrived many years after the Columbian Exchange introduced them to Europe.
A quibble: at location 1189, the author says that “the idea that economies evolved from barter to money to credit is a myth”. In support of this contention, the author cites the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. I have listened to Debt as an unabridged audiobook. It did not convince me completely. I've also read a lot of seemingly valid criticism online from economists who dispute Graeber’s contentions. I think that the word “myth” as used here is not really correct. Better: the idea is unproven, or (more wordy) a matter of debate.
Here are some quotes that I found interesting:
“Ireland before the famine, however, more closely resembled capitalism’s future than its past …. The staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potatoes failed” (l. 462).
“... samples from European potatoes preserved from the 1840s show that every sample’s genetic code contains a distinctive haplotype – an inheritable and distinct group of chromosomes, used by geneticists to trace lineages – tracked to the Toluca Valley in Mexico, where potatoes grow wild. Incredibly, this means that the European late-blight pandemic might have been caused by the arrival of a single blighted cargo of potatoes, or even just one blighted potato or preserved spore that then cloned itself by the quadrillions” (l. 2027).
“Some traditionalist Tories even considered the blight to be a hoax, perpetrated by the Whigs and Repealers to discredit or destroy the Union” (l. 2249).
“It was among the first international humanitarian crises to be widely publicised in newspapers worldwide and among the first to anchor a global fundraising effort” (l. 3138).
“The Famine was a crisis of ideas as well as policy – not a crisis of a lack of ideas, but of the implementation of an orthodoxy of ill-considered ideas, proven unfit for purpose in practice” (l. 4058).
The final sentence of this book:
“When the system functioned, it was civilisation. When it broke down, it was Providence” (l. 4143).
In summary, a good book for the interested non-expert historian with a clearly stated, understandable, and well-documented thesis.
I received an advance review copy of this book, electronically, for free, from the publisher via Netgalley.
August 5, 2025
This is an extremely well-researched book on An Gorta Mor, the Famine. Scanlan assiduously tries for objectivity on a topic that still elicits great emotion 175 years on. It is very well written beginning with an explanation of how the Irish came to rely upon the potato as the source of nourishment. That said, although he does in the middle chapters explain the land system, I don't believe he holds the British fully accountable for the system that it created that meant the people would live on smaller and smaller tracts of land, where oftentimes, the only dependable crop was the potato because it grows on almost any soil.
The history of English attitudes toward the Irish is well documented. The Reformation did not "take" in Ireland and the Crown created plantations by ethnically cleansing parts of the country replacing the native population with Protestants, primarily from Scotland. The belief was that Catholics, Irish Catholics were not really civilized so there was a need to civilize them. If that meant robbing them of their land, wiping out their language and culture, so be it. When the blight struck in 1845, it destroyed a substantial amount of that years' potatoes but when it returned year after year, it could not be ignored.
Laissez Faire was commonly adhered to in Britain at this time. The markets were more of a religion than their own religions and led to helping people who were unable to pay their rents (the vast majority of Catholics did not own their land by this point) starving, and suffering from a myriad of deadly diseases. Still, it is hard for the reader to accept that it was just a belief in "free markets" would have led the government to treat Irish people as they did. Although some measures were adopted during this time, they were always austerity measures. They argued that no one should get anything for nothing so there were labor requirements in order to receive that assistance which was very meager in any case. In order to justify this, people already ill and starving would have to work for it. Moreover, useless projects like building roads to nowhere and breaking stones were required. Many of the laborers died at their work place.
Dead bodies began to build up, with families too poor and weak to bury them. Scanlan relays the story with a level of objectivity that is almost hard to believe. Being of Irish descent himself, one would have expected more- still he is a historian so one must always strive to be objective. He tells the story very well and relates the failures of the government. Further, this book on the Famine includes details that many other books on the same topic do not. I recommend this book to anyone interested in 19th Century history or in humanity itself.
The history of English attitudes toward the Irish is well documented. The Reformation did not "take" in Ireland and the Crown created plantations by ethnically cleansing parts of the country replacing the native population with Protestants, primarily from Scotland. The belief was that Catholics, Irish Catholics were not really civilized so there was a need to civilize them. If that meant robbing them of their land, wiping out their language and culture, so be it. When the blight struck in 1845, it destroyed a substantial amount of that years' potatoes but when it returned year after year, it could not be ignored.
Laissez Faire was commonly adhered to in Britain at this time. The markets were more of a religion than their own religions and led to helping people who were unable to pay their rents (the vast majority of Catholics did not own their land by this point) starving, and suffering from a myriad of deadly diseases. Still, it is hard for the reader to accept that it was just a belief in "free markets" would have led the government to treat Irish people as they did. Although some measures were adopted during this time, they were always austerity measures. They argued that no one should get anything for nothing so there were labor requirements in order to receive that assistance which was very meager in any case. In order to justify this, people already ill and starving would have to work for it. Moreover, useless projects like building roads to nowhere and breaking stones were required. Many of the laborers died at their work place.
Dead bodies began to build up, with families too poor and weak to bury them. Scanlan relays the story with a level of objectivity that is almost hard to believe. Being of Irish descent himself, one would have expected more- still he is a historian so one must always strive to be objective. He tells the story very well and relates the failures of the government. Further, this book on the Famine includes details that many other books on the same topic do not. I recommend this book to anyone interested in 19th Century history or in humanity itself.
May 23, 2025
[T]he Irish economy resembled the precarious future of capitalism more than its feudal past.
Rot is an imperial polemic, a cultural and economic history which emphasizes that the Irish Potato Famine was a fundamentally – perhaps inevitably – modern phenomenon: a product of capitalism, of before-unseen rapid informational transfer and interconnected trade, and of the all-pervasiveness of ideology.
. . . Before and after the Union, and before and after the Great Famine, Ireland was imagined, governed, and exploited in strikingly colonial ways. The blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields of vulnerable plants. But the famine—a complex ecological, economic, logistical, and political disaster—was a consequence of colonialism.
For all that many Irish served in the military and bureaucratic apparatus of the British Empire aborad, the colonial imagination overlay perceptions of Irishness: deeply essentializing, racialism intersecting with protest virtue ethics and an unshakeable belief in laissez-faire economics as natural law.
The potato in periods of abundance and the relative food security it enabled created a generous gift culture, which was seen as just another primitivism. Scanlan emphasizes the psychological toil of pathological hunger even on able-bodied individuals: starvation drives to desperation; the shameful and hitherto unthinkable becomes necessary. The social body dissolves as human bodies eat themselves to keep on going. The text brilliantly utilizes folk memory to showcase the deep hallucinatory impressions of trauma and their generational legacy.
...Another, painfully modern aspect of the Great Famine is how public opinion grew tired by and apathetic to continuous humanitarian crisis whose persistence refused any victorious narrative. Successive governments tried to pronounce the problem over and done with, anyway. Thus, always, to problems. Sic semper tyrannidibus.
The imagery of famine can still deceive us as it deceived John Russell—skeletal limbs and swollen bellies can seem like elements of a barbaric past thrust into the civilised present. But famine in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, is a disease of modernity—of war, of ecological accident, of climate change, of the vicissitudes of markets acting on the vulnerable.
{This is a review based off an advanced reader's copy, generously provided by Basic Books and NetGalley. Review impartial, as far as sourcing is concern. Reviewer partial, as far as political economy is concerned.}
April 3, 2025
If this book was a bit more readable, I would have given it 5 Stars. But alas, the author is better at research that prose. That being said, the amount of research and references in this book are staggering. Scanlan manages to weave them all together in a narrative. It repeats itself and at times it reads like an academic paper.
But the story it is telling is engaging and strikingly modern. There had been famines before, but the Great Potato Famine was one of the first that was driven by capitalism. The disconnection between the government and the peasantry feels all too familiar in today's United States. There is a LOT of economic discussion but I thought it never became overbearing. And understanding the economic causes and consequences is central to understanding the famine as a historical event.
But the story it is telling is engaging and strikingly modern. There had been famines before, but the Great Potato Famine was one of the first that was driven by capitalism. The disconnection between the government and the peasantry feels all too familiar in today's United States. There is a LOT of economic discussion but I thought it never became overbearing. And understanding the economic causes and consequences is central to understanding the famine as a historical event.
February 11, 2026
it is no small miracle that I was able to finish a degree in history; this was an absolute slog for me. Although tbf it is a social economic history with a heavy emphasis on the economic.
Favourite quote "dozens of Irish varieties[of potato]: Horse Legs, Dutch Upright, Royal Early, Rocks(sometimes called Protestants)"
Favourite quote "dozens of Irish varieties[of potato]: Horse Legs, Dutch Upright, Royal Early, Rocks(sometimes called Protestants)"
February 17, 2026
Potatoes could feed more workers on less land, allowing landlords to raise more livestock and grain for export, primarily to colonial markets. When grain was valuable, landlords called for tillage. When speculators were bullish on beef or wool, fields of wheat and oats were flattened to graze cattle and sheep.On March 14, 2025, Trump, the 47th president of the United States, issued an executive order directing that, in regards to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, "the non-statutory components and functions ... shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law." Subsequently, the entire 70 person staff was put on leave. On December 3, 2025, what was left of the institute announced that, due to losing a lawsuit brought by the ALA and associated unions, the federal government would reinstate all federal grants. These grants are now qualified by the stipulation that all projects consist of "uplifting and positive narratives of our shared American experience" as befits executive order "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History". In April 2025, the Trump administration cut federal funding to the Whtiney Plantation, one of only two historic plantations in America devoted to the historical record of US slavery. On Oct 27, 2025, the Trump administration restored a statue of a Confederate general to Washington, D.C.'s Judiciary Square. On February 10, 2026, the Trump administration removed the rainbow flag that had historically flown at the Stonewall National Monument.
The potato could fail and collapse a family's prospects; a pig could kill a child, maim an adult, destroy a home. The Irish poor depended on both from necessity.
The staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potatoes failed.
In the Victorian era, a very small number of people owned the United Kingdom. Just under four thousand people owned nearly 80 percent of Irish land, under two thousand owned 93 percent of Scotland, about five thousand owned more than half of England, and seven hundred held 60 percent of Wales.It takes a lot of energy, education, financial stability, love, rage, and not selling out to write a book like this. Comparably, it doesn't take nearly as much to read it and understand it, but we're still talking a cross section of topics involving science, economics, politics, culture, and history that, as Faulkner will always say, is not even dead, is not even past. In short, Scanlan looks at the Irish Famine and its historiography in an effort to parse out how much of the death was calculated and how much was structural, from the major historical figures to the people showing up at soup kitchens, naked and screaming with hunger. His thesis? That the forces that created the disaster involved as much top down planning as it did free market exploitation, which, in this NAFTA/USMCA age of ours, is more than familiar. Of course, arguing such means contending with the strongest debaters that the status quo can muster, and while a couple of centuries has transformed the hegemony from British to US, that protestant work ethic, soaked to the gills with eugenics and bigotry, is still running strong.
A priest in Kells, County Meath, estimated that one in twenty families would be out of potatoes by Christmas. And yet even as the crisis deepened, the priest noted, exports kept moving out of the country. He saw at least fifty dray carts full of grain on the road to Drogheda, "thence to feed the foreigner.
Under the [Coercion Act], magistrates could dispense summary justice, habeas corpus could be suspended, and army regiments could occupy cities or counties. Coercion, designed for emergencies, became routine.Everyone these days wants a piece of the British Empire. From the video games about repatriating stolen museum artifacts to the period dramas swamping Netflix, love it or hate it, you likely can't formulate your personal identity without it. That's the price of living today, and with the number of billionaires and their average wealth climbing ever higher, one must contemplate, how did it ever come to this? Now, Ireland is one country, and this is only one famine that happened in said country's history. However, the power of the text is how easily Scanlan could and does translate it to any situation where the rich take all of the assets and none of the risk, from divide and conquer landholdings to bigoted media controlling public sympathy. Take the potato, won from bloody colonization: uniquely suited to local consumption with superb fecundity and poor portability, the landlords push the peasant down the chain of diminishing returns in a rollicking market until to eat anything other than the potato is suicide and to sell everything and then some is the surest way to survive a famine. Add in a few public works programs; a feeding scheme based on trade investment rather than empty mouths; donations that peter out as soon as the media cycle gets bored; and some bluebloods who see an entire country they've only been to once or twice, if that, as an opportunity to consolidate their LinkedIn connections, and you more than lay the scene for the 'Troubles'. Of course, no one wants to think about how people using KickStarter for medical care has a historical precedent (think about how the US took action on Jim Crow because it made them look bad in front of the portion of the world watching them face off with the Soviet Union), or how 'diverse representation' doesn't make a lick of difference when the entire social structure's being vivisected and sold for wriggling parts.
Political economy predicted that the poor would make the rational choice, choosing life over land, liberty, and family unity.
Outside Ireland, there were other crops for the poor to eat—and there were governments less fearful that generous relief would turn the poor into paupers.
By law, treason—which included armed rebellion but also advocating for the overthrow of the government in print or in public—was punishable by death. However, the government recognised that juries were reluctant to execute offenders for nonviolent dissent. The Whigs did not want martyrs or humiliation at the hands of sympathetic juries willing to nullify Crown prosecutions.What's the solution? What will protect you from being preyed upon who have enough wealth and prestige to outweigh the needs of entire countries? The right job? The correct 401k? The true path of immigration? Both Ireland and the Irish still exist, as Scanlan in the diaspora can more than attest to, and comparatively speaking, this particular famine would have gone a lot worse without the inordinate amount of media attention it was gifted (at least for the year or two that the newspaper were able to squeeze profit from the story for). So do many of the countries that, for whatever reason, have lost the game of independent control over the provisioning of their populations, something that the powers that be are too busy building plagiarism centers to 'solve'. Because if there's anything that I've learned about progress, it's how little it has to do with saving people and how much it does with murmuring sweet words of encouragement to the rich and powerful of, there. That's it. Nothing's going to hurt you. Just wait and see how we'll twist it all around, and then you'll be even more securely ensconced on top, for not only are you in your brave new world, here's another batch of the world's population that has been domesticated for your personal use, for so long as you have enough for a pay per presidency, does any of it really matter at all?
Mass death over the previous two years had lowered demand for rented land and housing. Reducing the number of available houses was a crude way to increase scarcity.
When one officer gave away a few bags of meal, Trevelyan fired off a message to Randolph Routh, one of the commissaries-general leading the administration of the relief program, reminding him to keep his men in line. "Our plan," he wrote to Routh, "is, not to give the meal away, but to sell it." If the Irish came to depend on free corn, the plan would fail. In June 1846, a request to distribute food was denied: "Gratuitous relief demoralizes the people."If there's anything I've learned since discovering I was trans and later on that I had cancer, it's how easy it would be to be suckerpunched into acceptance by a chosen few, follow said chosen few in every measure, and leave most everyone else to rot. And when you're white, blonde, blue eyed, skinny, masc passing, and more than a little intelligent, the rot is manifold, whether you intend it or not. So, the fact that Scanlan spends the last few pages looking at the famines that coursed throughout India during the 19th century forms an open invitation to, yes, take what he's discovered about the systemic inequities that plagued his people and apply them to yours. For that's what it's going to take, and as health science grinds to a halt because the CEOs are in thrall to the stock market and the world burns in order to call itself peace, these are the days of interesting times. I still don't have any faith that most of the loudest voices won't go blithely back to blue no matter who compliance once the bread and circuses change their hue, but at least I can ensure that the next non-academic who wants to read this doesn't have to drive 100 miles round trip to get a copy. It's a journey I don't mind, but not all of us thinkers should be forced to be that breed of masochistic.
What 1847 shows instead is the poverty of an early Victorian political imagination that could only see a solution to famine that depended on market principles and the disciplinary power of supply and demand.
Enslaved workers in Alabama, "told of the distressed condition of the Irish poor," raised $50. The Choctaw Nation donated $710, roughly $20,440 in today's money.
When the system functioned, it was civilisation. When it broke down, it was Providence.
June 26, 2025
An interesting, well-thought-out book on the Irish potato famine of 1847-1852. This one digs into the origins of the famine and the failed response by the UK government.
“The elements of Irish economic life that seemed precapitalist – wages paid in land, rent paid in labour, widespread subsistence agriculture – were adaptations to a competitive market structured by the dispossession and exploitation that followed the conquest of Ireland in the late 17th century.”
After the British conquest of Ireland, although Ireland was technically joined up to the “united” in the United Kingdom, it was in effect treated as a colony. As India was, and America before them. Bled dry for its resources and then discarded.
Ireland, in the 19th century, was heavily dependent on the potato for nutrition. I’ve often seen this cited with a kind of subtle eyeroll – a “What, you didn’t think relying on a single plant for your entire economy would be an issue?” – but the thing is, the Irish were aware of the problems this might pose (there were more mild blights throughout the earlier half of the 19th century) but they quite literally didn’t have a choice. Land had been so parceled up into tiny scraps by rising populations in Ireland (and exacerbated by the fact of being an island with a finite border) such that each family had such a small plot of land that growing literally any other crop wouldn’t have given them enough calories per person; potatoes were the only nutrient-dense thing they could grow enough of to survive.
Survive– not sell. Because potatoes had no value in the global market. The Irish couldn’t sell them to anyone. They could only use their tiny parcel of land (which usually wasn’t even theirs – it was loaned to them by wealthy landlords in exchange for their labour) to grow just enough potatoes for their family to live off, and that was it. Meaning they couldn’t save money for a rainy day – or the potato blight.
It’s not like the Irish climate couldn’t grow other crops, though. Wealthy owners of large plots of land grew wheat, other grains, and livestock, which were exported and sold in the global market, especially to Britain.
When the blight struck and wiped out the entire potato crop for several years in a row, the British government’s response was slow and mostly useless. They set up food kitchens for a year or two and set up some workhouses to put the able-bodied to work. But they refused to, for instance, reduce the export of non-potato foods from Ireland. Throughout the famine, Ireland just kept pumping out food to Britain – food the Irish had grown but couldn’t afford to buy, because the British government didn’t introduce subsidies or price caps or other measures to keep Irish food in Ireland to feed the starving Irish people.
And even the meager support provided by the UK government was soon withdrawn. Why? Because the British adhered to laissez-faire economic principles and believed the free market would naturally resolve the famine (at the cost of lives, of course). But it went a bit deeper than that. Protestant, capitalist Britain considered the famine to be a kind of moral cleansing, and that providing aid to the starving Irish would undermine their ability to achieve moral and economic discipline. The potato, they decided, had been “quite too good” for the Irish.
Newspapers at the time in Britain wrote that “in England, hunger would have been a spur to effect innovation and prosperity. The Irish, though, had no stomach for hard work, only for potatoes.” They must become carnivorous, another wrote – then, the taste of meat would stir the appetite and the work ethic in them (a galling kind of 19th century British “let them eat cake”)
One small ray of sunshine though – much of the global community pooled together to try to alleviate the Irish suffering. I loved learning about how the Choctaw and Black communities in the US collected and donated funds for famine relief! There’s even a statue in Ireland commemorating the donations of the Choctaw.
One small criticism of this book: it was a little disorganised. I felt like the chapters jumped around a bit and didn’t always flow either chronologically or conceptually – but on the whole this is a really well-written and researched book.
“The elements of Irish economic life that seemed precapitalist – wages paid in land, rent paid in labour, widespread subsistence agriculture – were adaptations to a competitive market structured by the dispossession and exploitation that followed the conquest of Ireland in the late 17th century.”
After the British conquest of Ireland, although Ireland was technically joined up to the “united” in the United Kingdom, it was in effect treated as a colony. As India was, and America before them. Bled dry for its resources and then discarded.
Ireland, in the 19th century, was heavily dependent on the potato for nutrition. I’ve often seen this cited with a kind of subtle eyeroll – a “What, you didn’t think relying on a single plant for your entire economy would be an issue?” – but the thing is, the Irish were aware of the problems this might pose (there were more mild blights throughout the earlier half of the 19th century) but they quite literally didn’t have a choice. Land had been so parceled up into tiny scraps by rising populations in Ireland (and exacerbated by the fact of being an island with a finite border) such that each family had such a small plot of land that growing literally any other crop wouldn’t have given them enough calories per person; potatoes were the only nutrient-dense thing they could grow enough of to survive.
Survive– not sell. Because potatoes had no value in the global market. The Irish couldn’t sell them to anyone. They could only use their tiny parcel of land (which usually wasn’t even theirs – it was loaned to them by wealthy landlords in exchange for their labour) to grow just enough potatoes for their family to live off, and that was it. Meaning they couldn’t save money for a rainy day – or the potato blight.
It’s not like the Irish climate couldn’t grow other crops, though. Wealthy owners of large plots of land grew wheat, other grains, and livestock, which were exported and sold in the global market, especially to Britain.
When the blight struck and wiped out the entire potato crop for several years in a row, the British government’s response was slow and mostly useless. They set up food kitchens for a year or two and set up some workhouses to put the able-bodied to work. But they refused to, for instance, reduce the export of non-potato foods from Ireland. Throughout the famine, Ireland just kept pumping out food to Britain – food the Irish had grown but couldn’t afford to buy, because the British government didn’t introduce subsidies or price caps or other measures to keep Irish food in Ireland to feed the starving Irish people.
And even the meager support provided by the UK government was soon withdrawn. Why? Because the British adhered to laissez-faire economic principles and believed the free market would naturally resolve the famine (at the cost of lives, of course). But it went a bit deeper than that. Protestant, capitalist Britain considered the famine to be a kind of moral cleansing, and that providing aid to the starving Irish would undermine their ability to achieve moral and economic discipline. The potato, they decided, had been “quite too good” for the Irish.
Newspapers at the time in Britain wrote that “in England, hunger would have been a spur to effect innovation and prosperity. The Irish, though, had no stomach for hard work, only for potatoes.” They must become carnivorous, another wrote – then, the taste of meat would stir the appetite and the work ethic in them (a galling kind of 19th century British “let them eat cake”)
One small ray of sunshine though – much of the global community pooled together to try to alleviate the Irish suffering. I loved learning about how the Choctaw and Black communities in the US collected and donated funds for famine relief! There’s even a statue in Ireland commemorating the donations of the Choctaw.
One small criticism of this book: it was a little disorganised. I felt like the chapters jumped around a bit and didn’t always flow either chronologically or conceptually – but on the whole this is a really well-written and researched book.
May 17, 2025
This is a book about the economics of the potato famine in Ireland from 1845 to 1851. It explains the reasons behind the failure and the economic devastation this had on the Irish economy. It also explains the reasons behind failed efforts by the Crown to provide relief. I believe it is well researched, but it is very dry unless 100s or pages of detailed economic discussion is what you enjoy. Despite this, I think the book is a great source for the researcher.
July 12, 2025
1) Fuck imperialism
2) Fuck capitalism
3) Fuck the market
2) Fuck capitalism
3) Fuck the market
July 11, 2025
Extremely repetitive. Scanlan hit the same points multiple times, sometimes phrased the exact same ways, to the book's detriment. Half the book is set up for the famine, and details about the famine and its aftermath was much sketchier. Emigration, for example, was mentioning but not discussed or elaborated on with any detail. also, the focus is more on systems than individuals, so there's not a human face on the Irish who were suffering--they are as faceless as they must have seemed to the average Englishman during the famine. Which seems like a weird choice for a book about how systems dehumanized the Irish.
November 24, 2025
I like how this book dug into a lot of assumptions about the Irish Potato Famine and made a solid argument for the real causes. Spoiler alert: It was Capitalist Dogma and Colonial Extraction that both set up and exacerbated the crisis.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 4, 2025
Learning about An Gorta Mór generally comes in two parts like this: first you learn that it was a famine caused by potato blight; then you learn that it was a genocide caused by the British.
The full story, as rigorously laid out by Scanlan’s excellent book, is that although the British empire was not necessarily deliberately trying to cull the colonized population of Ireland, their devotion to free market capitalism meant that they expected the Irish to pull themselves out of hunger and poverty despite oppressing them under a system that consistently prevented them from doing so.
Rot covers in great detail the political and socioeconomic factors that led to the famine’s ravages, the parallels between British rule in Ireland and its other colonies such as India, which also suffered massively devastating famines, and the major figures involved in fomenting and firming the conditions that led to the situation.
The book is incredibly thorough, although I found it to be repetitive in some parts as nearly every chapter re-iterates the context in a way that I found unnecessary. An excellent, in-depth history book, and I also appreciated the conclusions that paralleled the British government’s actions (and inactions) during the time with the capitalist disdain for social welfare that continues to hamper aid and socioeconomic equality efforts today.
The full story, as rigorously laid out by Scanlan’s excellent book, is that although the British empire was not necessarily deliberately trying to cull the colonized population of Ireland, their devotion to free market capitalism meant that they expected the Irish to pull themselves out of hunger and poverty despite oppressing them under a system that consistently prevented them from doing so.
Rot covers in great detail the political and socioeconomic factors that led to the famine’s ravages, the parallels between British rule in Ireland and its other colonies such as India, which also suffered massively devastating famines, and the major figures involved in fomenting and firming the conditions that led to the situation.
The book is incredibly thorough, although I found it to be repetitive in some parts as nearly every chapter re-iterates the context in a way that I found unnecessary. An excellent, in-depth history book, and I also appreciated the conclusions that paralleled the British government’s actions (and inactions) during the time with the capitalist disdain for social welfare that continues to hamper aid and socioeconomic equality efforts today.
February 5, 2026
"The Great Famine also gave the British Empire a blueprint for digesting the ecological and human consequences of a burdensome and often destructive global system of agriculture and trade that benefited Britain at the expense of the Empire. When the system functioned, it was civilization. When it broke down, it was providence."
October 14, 2025
well written, well argued
July 2, 2025
Rot is a work that cleanly relies on aspects of cultural, political, and economic history to argue that the Great Hunger was not an inevitable, ancient horror unleashed on Ireland but rather an incredibly modern product of capitalism, born out of British prejudice and commitment to civilize the world through the power of the wage-labor system. Ireland, with its complicated economy, appeared to exist outside the world of the market, when in reality the swings of the market were felt most sharply by the Irish poor. Political economy was viewed as a natural law, one that the world would eventually adapt to and in which it was Britain's mission to bring about.
Due to this unrelenting belief in the natural laws of political economy, British aid came with steep stipulations. A person who needed aid needed to prove their need through a complex bureaucratic process, in order for the government to avoid creating a system that undercut the wage-labor system. Those who could work split rocks (which eventually were imported to Ireland just to give work) or build roads to nowhere, all in insistence that work would civilize Ireland and end the agricultural system that existed, in which the people were closely connected to the land. In one of the most heartbreaking moments of the Great Hunger, Scanlan describes the way that homes were deroofed in order to evict people amidst the crisis, done because, "Mass death over the previous two years had lowered demand for rented land and housing. Reducing the number of available houses was a crude way to increase scarcity. Other landlords used unroofing to begin to convert their land, as in Gort Union, County Clare, to sheep walks. To either reduce taxes, raise rents, or convert tilled fields to grazing for cattle and sheep, eviction was useful."
This is a thorough and necessary examination in the Irish Famine that provides both a wide scope of its causes, its course, and the terror it unleashed upon Ireland underpinned by British insistence on the civilizing power of political economy. Scanlan's final sentence is particularly resonant, and one which I will include here as well, "When the system functioned, it was civilisation. When it broke down, it was Providence."
Due to this unrelenting belief in the natural laws of political economy, British aid came with steep stipulations. A person who needed aid needed to prove their need through a complex bureaucratic process, in order for the government to avoid creating a system that undercut the wage-labor system. Those who could work split rocks (which eventually were imported to Ireland just to give work) or build roads to nowhere, all in insistence that work would civilize Ireland and end the agricultural system that existed, in which the people were closely connected to the land. In one of the most heartbreaking moments of the Great Hunger, Scanlan describes the way that homes were deroofed in order to evict people amidst the crisis, done because, "Mass death over the previous two years had lowered demand for rented land and housing. Reducing the number of available houses was a crude way to increase scarcity. Other landlords used unroofing to begin to convert their land, as in Gort Union, County Clare, to sheep walks. To either reduce taxes, raise rents, or convert tilled fields to grazing for cattle and sheep, eviction was useful."
This is a thorough and necessary examination in the Irish Famine that provides both a wide scope of its causes, its course, and the terror it unleashed upon Ireland underpinned by British insistence on the civilizing power of political economy. Scanlan's final sentence is particularly resonant, and one which I will include here as well, "When the system functioned, it was civilisation. When it broke down, it was Providence."
April 20, 2025
An extremely comprehensive look at the way British imperialism starved an entire nation and an unlearning of the neutral language and cultural assignment of Irish potato famine regarding the human-created tragedy. I will be thinking about this book for years
April 17, 2025
Some parts were great, some were too dry and bogged down with numbers and statistics.
But I did learn a lot and there are some fascinating and harrowing stories of working class Irish folks surviving and dying through the Famine. Averaging out to being a good, not great book.
But I did learn a lot and there are some fascinating and harrowing stories of working class Irish folks surviving and dying through the Famine. Averaging out to being a good, not great book.
September 10, 2025
Booooooorrrrrrriiiiinnnnnng. Interesting subject matter and many good points made. But the author repeats the same thesis over and over and over again in new ways. A book that would be good to read chapters of for a history class, but the book as a whole was a drag to get through.
January 15, 2026
I think I was expecting a radical retelling of history, a history from below, and that's absolutely not what it was. The only parts of this book that were new information to me was the fact that potato blight is still a constant in Ireland, and all the information about pig diseases. It felt more like an economic history of the famine, if anything, than an imperial history.
June 6, 2025
Earlier this year I read The Irishman's Daughter by V.S. Alexander, a powerful drama about the potato famine. Consequently, when I noticed Rot, I thought it would extend my interest in that time in Ireland. Padraic X. Scanlan discusses the potato famine in detail. The horrors of starvation are vivid. I found parts of Scanlan's reporting repetitive and monotonous.
May 11, 2025
4.5
The politics if the Great Famine and a detailed look at why it came to pass.
The politics if the Great Famine and a detailed look at why it came to pass.
July 19, 2025
A bit tough- going and depressing, but an impressive synthesis of exhaustive research. Spoiler: then as now, the root cause and main villain is capitalism.
September 16, 2025
So I would like to talk about the famine
January 15, 2026
Took me a while to get into this as there was a lot of information to take in. Learned a lot about the famine, the relief efforts and some local consequences that I wasn’t previously aware of.
Read
February 1, 2026This book was very dense and tough to get through. Hard to connect to all the economic data but what can’t be argued is how devastating the famine was for many people.
June 1, 2025
Impressive history of prejudice that blinds the British to their creation of the Irish Potato Famine and its horrific suffering, through absentee land owners, untenable shipping practices and demonizing Catholics.
March 16, 2025
Rot discusses the physical and political reasons for the Irish potato famine of the 1840s and 50s. What caused so many to have to choose between emigration and starvation? Where were the rich British landlords when their workers were starving? However, it shines a harsh light on our current American system of worrying more about profits than people too. After all, the oligarchs’ playbook hasn’t really changed in 200 years.
England in the 19th century believed that market forces could fix any problem. It wasn’t capitalism that caused the potatoes to rot in the ground. But, it did encourage some pretty harsh ideas like blaming the Irish for being too lazy to work for wages and too “country” to eat bread like civilized people. If only the Irish were more like the English poor. Why in the world would the British government give them free food or money? That would just encourage them not to work. Some in England even thought that the Great Famine would help cull the large Irish families of their weakest members, which was perceived as a good thing.
So why were the Irish so dependent on a single, originally imported, crop? England effectively used all the good Irish land as a giant cash machine for producing crops and livestock that would bring a great profit to its English owners when exported. The worst land was left to the Irish farmers who grew potatoes because they grew in poor soil and provided a complete meal without additional processing.
Originally, I chose to read Rot because I’m 50% of Irish descent. My ancestors were the lucky ones who immigrated to America, in 1847, rather than starve. I wanted to know more about how such a long lasting famine was allowed to continue without English government intervention. However, as I was reading the book, I kept seeing the parallels in the thinking of the English government then and the USA government now.
Rot is a fascinating look at how unfettered capitalism is not necessarily a good thing when unscrupulous, rather than compassionate, people are in charge. It will really make you think long after the book is finished. 5 stars and a must read!
Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for providing me with an advanced review copy.
England in the 19th century believed that market forces could fix any problem. It wasn’t capitalism that caused the potatoes to rot in the ground. But, it did encourage some pretty harsh ideas like blaming the Irish for being too lazy to work for wages and too “country” to eat bread like civilized people. If only the Irish were more like the English poor. Why in the world would the British government give them free food or money? That would just encourage them not to work. Some in England even thought that the Great Famine would help cull the large Irish families of their weakest members, which was perceived as a good thing.
So why were the Irish so dependent on a single, originally imported, crop? England effectively used all the good Irish land as a giant cash machine for producing crops and livestock that would bring a great profit to its English owners when exported. The worst land was left to the Irish farmers who grew potatoes because they grew in poor soil and provided a complete meal without additional processing.
Originally, I chose to read Rot because I’m 50% of Irish descent. My ancestors were the lucky ones who immigrated to America, in 1847, rather than starve. I wanted to know more about how such a long lasting famine was allowed to continue without English government intervention. However, as I was reading the book, I kept seeing the parallels in the thinking of the English government then and the USA government now.
Rot is a fascinating look at how unfettered capitalism is not necessarily a good thing when unscrupulous, rather than compassionate, people are in charge. It will really make you think long after the book is finished. 5 stars and a must read!
Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for providing me with an advanced review copy.
October 11, 2025
Good book on The Great Famine in Ireland.
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