ROT

What was the true cause of Ireland's deadly disaster?

Scanlan, author of Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain, turns his attention to Ireland’s infamous potato blight, or “apocalypse.” Between 1845 and 1851, at least a million people died and more than 1.5 million migrated. The famine, a “complex, ecological, economic, logistical, and political disaster,” he argues, “was a consequence of colonialism.” The newly formed United Kingdom’s press on the Irish economy and its people, which they looked down on, made the potato a precious subsistence staple along with pigs, which were usually sold, and peat. Ireland became a “casualty of modern capitalism at its most corrosive and destructive.” Scanlan neatly chronicles the history of England’s ever-growing Protestant financial exploitation over the “uncivilized” Catholic Ireland’s poor and their tenant farms. Grain, dairy, and meat were exported at very low U.K.-set prices. The country had been subjugated by conquest, colonialism, and capitalism even before the famine made it a nation of debtors and beggars susceptible to subsistence crises and epidemic disease. The potato blight—Phytophthora infestans—struck in 1845 in North America, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands before striking Ireland in August due to excess moisture and quickly turning into a famine. Scanlan goes into detail discussing the famine’s effect on British politics and its relief measures for Ireland, including offering them maize to buy. By winter 1846-1847, “rural Ireland became a hellscape, shocking and incomprehensible.” The bonds of social life “dissolved.” England’s “public works were shambolic as well as bureaucratic.” The last years of the blight, 1848-1849, were the worst. Starvation and disease surged. Organizations around the world raised funds. Soup kitchens and workhouses proliferated while evictions soared. For England, the Great Famine proved that Ireland was still a “half-civilised colony.”

Shelve this fine history next to Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot.