Luke’s Reviews > Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine > Status Update

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."

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.

"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." (for comparison purposes, the population of Britain rose from 13.9 million in 1831 to 32.5 million in 1901)

Lately it's the Troubles making the bestseller lists, but what I want to know is whether the century prior laid the scene with a genocide.