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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
March 25, 2025
This is an analytic history of the Irish Famine. Scanlon is interested in understanding why this horror occurred.
He has a very clear theory.
"The (potato) blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields of vulnerable plants. But the famine - a complex ecological, economic, logistic and political disaster- was a consequence of colonialism."......."Political history, not natural history, turned a potato failure into a famine."
"No individual caused the Great Famine; no individual could have prevented it. However, Ireland relied on potatoes because of its position in the British Empire."
British policy was driven by a faith in the power of markets. "In reality, the Irish poor needed relief from the market, not relief through the market."......"Under famine conditions, relief plans that required work in exchange for food or money left the people vulnerable to die first."
Most books on the Famine focus on the horrific tales of starvation. They quote reporters, officials and observers who find huts filled with dead, starved bodies or the roads filled with starving zombie-like figures. Scanlon seems to feel no need to retell the same story.
Scanlon shows how Ireland in the 1840s was economically a colony of England. The land was almost all owned by the colonialist British. There was almost no hard industry. The tiny farms were used to raise crops and livestock to be exported to England.
The Irish were considered lazy and lacking in ambition. They didn't even try to develop their farms or become active economic actors. The British claimed that potato farming, which required little tending during the growing season, was a perfect metaphor for the lazy Irish. Scanlon explains, in detail, how "the Irish poor did not live beyond the market-they were in its teeth."
Scanlon starts with the obvious point that the potato was not introduced into Ireland until the 1600s. It was not part of traditional Irish culture. He then explains, how the high rents and the need to pay them from the export of cash crops left the Irish with no real choice than to rely on potatoes. He also shows how the high rents were the result of the confiscation by the English of all of the Irish lands.
He shows how the Irish "hovels" were not traditional Irish homes; they were a new type of housing caused by new poverty.
Scanlan tracks the English relief efforts in detail. The English were more horrified that an Irish person would get food without paying for it in cash or work then they were that an Irish person would starve to death. They were convinced that if they ever just gave out famine relief for free, the recipients would expect it forever and would lose all desire to work. This wasn't an economic or sociological belief. It was an almost religious belief. Millions died because of it.
Scanlan maintains a calm and balanced tone throughout the book, although his anger and his judgements are not hidden. It is the best explanation I have seen for why it happened.
If you want an introduction to the subject, Cecil Woodham-Smith's 1962 book, "The Great Hunger. Ireland 1845-1849" is the place to start. Dublin is 288 miles from London. That book leaves you asking, "how could this happen next door to the most advanced nation in the world in 1847?" This book helps to understand the answer.
He has a very clear theory.
"The (potato) blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields of vulnerable plants. But the famine - a complex ecological, economic, logistic and political disaster- was a consequence of colonialism."......."Political history, not natural history, turned a potato failure into a famine."
"No individual caused the Great Famine; no individual could have prevented it. However, Ireland relied on potatoes because of its position in the British Empire."
British policy was driven by a faith in the power of markets. "In reality, the Irish poor needed relief from the market, not relief through the market."......"Under famine conditions, relief plans that required work in exchange for food or money left the people vulnerable to die first."
Most books on the Famine focus on the horrific tales of starvation. They quote reporters, officials and observers who find huts filled with dead, starved bodies or the roads filled with starving zombie-like figures. Scanlon seems to feel no need to retell the same story.
Scanlon shows how Ireland in the 1840s was economically a colony of England. The land was almost all owned by the colonialist British. There was almost no hard industry. The tiny farms were used to raise crops and livestock to be exported to England.
The Irish were considered lazy and lacking in ambition. They didn't even try to develop their farms or become active economic actors. The British claimed that potato farming, which required little tending during the growing season, was a perfect metaphor for the lazy Irish. Scanlon explains, in detail, how "the Irish poor did not live beyond the market-they were in its teeth."
Scanlon starts with the obvious point that the potato was not introduced into Ireland until the 1600s. It was not part of traditional Irish culture. He then explains, how the high rents and the need to pay them from the export of cash crops left the Irish with no real choice than to rely on potatoes. He also shows how the high rents were the result of the confiscation by the English of all of the Irish lands.
He shows how the Irish "hovels" were not traditional Irish homes; they were a new type of housing caused by new poverty.
Scanlan tracks the English relief efforts in detail. The English were more horrified that an Irish person would get food without paying for it in cash or work then they were that an Irish person would starve to death. They were convinced that if they ever just gave out famine relief for free, the recipients would expect it forever and would lose all desire to work. This wasn't an economic or sociological belief. It was an almost religious belief. Millions died because of it.
Scanlan maintains a calm and balanced tone throughout the book, although his anger and his judgements are not hidden. It is the best explanation I have seen for why it happened.
If you want an introduction to the subject, Cecil Woodham-Smith's 1962 book, "The Great Hunger. Ireland 1845-1849" is the place to start. Dublin is 288 miles from London. That book leaves you asking, "how could this happen next door to the most advanced nation in the world in 1847?" This book helps to understand the answer.
September 7, 2025
There are many non-fiction and fiction books on the Irish Famine out now. In Ireland, we still call it the Famine. As we head towards the 200th anniversary, there seems to be a buildup of remembrance. It’s a story that will not run out of steam after 150 years of silence. The Famine has an endless fascination for Irish people living in Ireland, England and North America. We actually understand these things better now than we did 30 years ago at the 150th anniversary or the 100th anniversary. Expect the 2045 anniversary to be quite the outpouring. There will be more dystopian novels along the lines of Black 47 and the story described in the Fields of Athenry. Paul Lynch has a famine story called Grace, which is his follow-up to the Booker-winning dystopia Prophet Song.
The book starts by describing the precarious economics of Ireland in the early 19th century, especially after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. This is not the ancient land of Ireland. Ireland was in the throes of British Empire capitalism – an early adopter of the colonial experience. The famine caused more destruction of economic value in that century than any other event. It also explains a lot of the social structures and land ownership from the late 19th century right up to Ireland joining the EEC (future European Union) in 1973. The pyramid or renting, the wrong type of debt and the fluctuating price of potatoes and other essential goods forced the poorest Irish labourers to be among the most aggressive and risk-taking of speculators. The imperial cause and being a colony are repeated throughout the book, and evidence for the same is given. The first two chapters give the origin story of the famine. It wasn't just that the blight rotted the people's food. It was systematic institutions that existed for 50 years beforehand that led to an accident waiting to happen.
Chapter 3, The People's Potato, the economy of the majority of the population is described. Seasonal migration to England was the only opportunity to earn wages. There was a shortage of cash, and the poor were always disadvantaged with a credit system which was stacked against them. The three-legged stool of pigs, potatoes and turf was an efficient way for many people to survive on land without modernising. “The potatoes was our sole and only capital to live and work on, to make much or little of, and on it the entire social capital of this country was founded, formed and supported.”, said James Fintan Lawlor, a contemporary writer. No profit could be made from potatoes or peat – only the pigs brought cash. The potato economy kept people out of the capitalist system. Potatoes couldn't be exported; shipping was difficult. But there was a cash crop economy operating side by side, and food was exported. Depictions of Irish idleness were widespread in Britain, and this racial stereotype still prevailed in Britain until the 1990s.
Chapter 4 described the arrival of the blight to the potato crop and the Peel government's response. Public works invented as a way of distributing aid in exchange for labour was the first response.
Chapter 5 is entitled The End of the World and is a description of utter disaster, especially in 1847. The Works programmes are a failure and are shut down. Soup kitchens go into full swing. Some myths, such as taking the soup to convert to Protestantism, are not true. That proselytising happened later. It was the first modern famine with the whole world knowing what's happening within weeks. Money was sent from American slaves to Ottomans to British India to Choctaw Indians in Oklahoma. British authorities wouldn’t allow the Ottoman food aid to enter Dublin port so it was diverted to Drogheda port, with the result that there continues to be a connection between the Drogheda United soccer team and modern Turkey – in their team emblem and sponsorship by Turkish Airlines. Similarly, the Choctaw nation in Oklahoma donated directly to Midleton in East Cork and today University College Cork has a scholarship for Choctaw students to study in UCC.
Chapter 6: Expulsion. Expulsion from the land and emigration is what changed Ireland and the rural economy forever. The returns on exploiting the labour of the Irish poor had long diminished. Now surplus to requirements, they were expelled. Tenant rights were answered in the House of Commons by statements such as, "You might as well compensate the rabbits for the burrows they've built in landlords' lands." Conditions in the workhouses had to be worse than conditions for the poorest of workers on the outside. Only the poorest and most desperate would go there. It was a limbo, a way of separating the survivors from those who were almost dead. Those high walls are still on the Irish landscape in Kilmacthomas, Roscommon and Galway and are a guilt trip for the descendants of the survivors who live in Ireland today. There's very detailed analysis of the economics of the workhouse. The ratepayers are keeping it going, and they collect rates from their fellow large farmers. The Encumbered Estate Act in 1848 was the next parliamentary tool employed to allow bankrupt landlords to divest the land of its people and for themselves to divest the land. Clearing the land was the objective and the result, so the 8 million population pre-Famine was reduced to 6.5 million in 1851. Eventually the poor just fucked off out of Ireland. 10 million of them in all by 1960.
Chapter 7: The Crystal Palace
The exhibition in 1951 celebrating the British Empire does not mention the famine even though there were 300 exhibits from Ireland. British imperial culture was suspicious of the poor everywhere, of the Irish in general, and of the Irish poor in particular.
There are many references to other works on the Famine in this thoroughly referenced work. It probably wouldn’t make a good introduction book. I don’t know how much new research the author is bringing to the table because I'm not a historian. But it’s a great read for anyone with a yearning to understand the intersection of economics and politics and will make you want to find out more. The book repeatedly talks about systemic failures rather than pinpointing villains so this makes it a more turgid but rewarding read than some more emotional accounts of the Irish Famine. The final sentence of this book sums it up best:
"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 civilisation. When it broke down, it was
Providence."
Two articles I liked are Fintan O'Toole's review in The New Yorker from March 2025 and
Colm Toibin's Erasures article on the Famine in the London Review of Books a few years ago
The book starts by describing the precarious economics of Ireland in the early 19th century, especially after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. This is not the ancient land of Ireland. Ireland was in the throes of British Empire capitalism – an early adopter of the colonial experience. The famine caused more destruction of economic value in that century than any other event. It also explains a lot of the social structures and land ownership from the late 19th century right up to Ireland joining the EEC (future European Union) in 1973. The pyramid or renting, the wrong type of debt and the fluctuating price of potatoes and other essential goods forced the poorest Irish labourers to be among the most aggressive and risk-taking of speculators. The imperial cause and being a colony are repeated throughout the book, and evidence for the same is given. The first two chapters give the origin story of the famine. It wasn't just that the blight rotted the people's food. It was systematic institutions that existed for 50 years beforehand that led to an accident waiting to happen.
Chapter 3, The People's Potato, the economy of the majority of the population is described. Seasonal migration to England was the only opportunity to earn wages. There was a shortage of cash, and the poor were always disadvantaged with a credit system which was stacked against them. The three-legged stool of pigs, potatoes and turf was an efficient way for many people to survive on land without modernising. “The potatoes was our sole and only capital to live and work on, to make much or little of, and on it the entire social capital of this country was founded, formed and supported.”, said James Fintan Lawlor, a contemporary writer. No profit could be made from potatoes or peat – only the pigs brought cash. The potato economy kept people out of the capitalist system. Potatoes couldn't be exported; shipping was difficult. But there was a cash crop economy operating side by side, and food was exported. Depictions of Irish idleness were widespread in Britain, and this racial stereotype still prevailed in Britain until the 1990s.
Chapter 4 described the arrival of the blight to the potato crop and the Peel government's response. Public works invented as a way of distributing aid in exchange for labour was the first response.
Chapter 5 is entitled The End of the World and is a description of utter disaster, especially in 1847. The Works programmes are a failure and are shut down. Soup kitchens go into full swing. Some myths, such as taking the soup to convert to Protestantism, are not true. That proselytising happened later. It was the first modern famine with the whole world knowing what's happening within weeks. Money was sent from American slaves to Ottomans to British India to Choctaw Indians in Oklahoma. British authorities wouldn’t allow the Ottoman food aid to enter Dublin port so it was diverted to Drogheda port, with the result that there continues to be a connection between the Drogheda United soccer team and modern Turkey – in their team emblem and sponsorship by Turkish Airlines. Similarly, the Choctaw nation in Oklahoma donated directly to Midleton in East Cork and today University College Cork has a scholarship for Choctaw students to study in UCC.
Chapter 6: Expulsion. Expulsion from the land and emigration is what changed Ireland and the rural economy forever. The returns on exploiting the labour of the Irish poor had long diminished. Now surplus to requirements, they were expelled. Tenant rights were answered in the House of Commons by statements such as, "You might as well compensate the rabbits for the burrows they've built in landlords' lands." Conditions in the workhouses had to be worse than conditions for the poorest of workers on the outside. Only the poorest and most desperate would go there. It was a limbo, a way of separating the survivors from those who were almost dead. Those high walls are still on the Irish landscape in Kilmacthomas, Roscommon and Galway and are a guilt trip for the descendants of the survivors who live in Ireland today. There's very detailed analysis of the economics of the workhouse. The ratepayers are keeping it going, and they collect rates from their fellow large farmers. The Encumbered Estate Act in 1848 was the next parliamentary tool employed to allow bankrupt landlords to divest the land of its people and for themselves to divest the land. Clearing the land was the objective and the result, so the 8 million population pre-Famine was reduced to 6.5 million in 1851. Eventually the poor just fucked off out of Ireland. 10 million of them in all by 1960.
Chapter 7: The Crystal Palace
The exhibition in 1951 celebrating the British Empire does not mention the famine even though there were 300 exhibits from Ireland. British imperial culture was suspicious of the poor everywhere, of the Irish in general, and of the Irish poor in particular.
There are many references to other works on the Famine in this thoroughly referenced work. It probably wouldn’t make a good introduction book. I don’t know how much new research the author is bringing to the table because I'm not a historian. But it’s a great read for anyone with a yearning to understand the intersection of economics and politics and will make you want to find out more. The book repeatedly talks about systemic failures rather than pinpointing villains so this makes it a more turgid but rewarding read than some more emotional accounts of the Irish Famine. The final sentence of this book sums it up best:
"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 civilisation. When it broke down, it was
Providence."
Two articles I liked are Fintan O'Toole's review in The New Yorker from March 2025 and
Colm Toibin's Erasures article on the Famine in the London Review of Books a few years ago
March 19, 2025
This book would have worked better as a long form essay. It’s full of information and I found it incredibly educational. My issue is the repetitiveness. Every chapter is just a extended rehashed discussion of how the British expected the market to handle the famine, and how the Irish relied on potatoes, which rotted because monoculture. One part that wasn’t reworked again and again was the political situation. There is a deep dive into the British politics that helped cause the disaster- as the book points out the famine while not a deliberate engineered event was exacerbated by government action/inaction. Final thoughts- solid book if a bit drawn out.
April 27, 2025
I was excited to learn about this book but it was not east I was looking for.
It is very focused on the politics, economic philosophy and policies of the British - and how that exacerbated the famine. I found it a bit dry and repetitive.
I think I had expected more insight into how individuals and families actually experience and dealt with the blight. How was the experience different in Dublin vs rural areas, and then again across rural areas? Who actually survived vs who perished?
Not what I was looking for and not particularly interesting even for someone like myself who is also interested in the questions the author did deal with.
It is very focused on the politics, economic philosophy and policies of the British - and how that exacerbated the famine. I found it a bit dry and repetitive.
I think I had expected more insight into how individuals and families actually experience and dealt with the blight. How was the experience different in Dublin vs rural areas, and then again across rural areas? Who actually survived vs who perished?
Not what I was looking for and not particularly interesting even for someone like myself who is also interested in the questions the author did deal with.
July 21, 2025
a very repetitive very repetitive VERY REPETITIVE economic history of the Great Famine in Ireland. there are next to no anecdotes in this book and the ones that do appear are limited to a couple sentences. All that being said, i definitely acknowledge there was a succinct argument and it was well-supported. i definitely learned something from reading this book even though it bored me.
April 15, 2025
4.5/5
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