Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine - Padraic X. Scanlan
Published in 2025 by Basic Books, New York, NY
352 pages
ISBN:9781541601543
In the summer of 1845, Irish farmers again turned to their small plots of land only to discover blackened, liquefied, and completely inedible potatoes. Already strained from several seasons of poor harvests, the Irish population was in dire straits. Since most of Ireland’s diverse agricultural products were exported to England, the Irish poor were almost entirely dependent on the potato, a cheap crop that maintained nutrition and could be cultivated en masse on small patches of land.
Thus, as a result of the horrid blight that struck a crop on which the Irish were so intimately dependent, more than one million people died of starvation and exposure. At the same time, another two million emigrated to other countries. Civil unrest broke out across the country, specifically in the rural, Irish-speaking west and south. Overall, almost one-quarter of the population of Ireland either died or fled in the decades between 1845 and 1875, and the population of Ireland has still not surpassed its pre-famine amount.
This drastic demographic shift led to significant cultural, political, and economic changes in Ireland, some of which are still felt today. It is still common to associate the Irish with the potato, as British propaganda during the mid-19th century depicted the Irish as lazy and subhuman, often featuring the infamous image of Paddy clinging tightly to his potato. While England was becoming the wealthiest and most influential nation during this late colonial era, the island of Ireland, which had become a part of the United Kingdom at the beginning of the century, was facing mass death and starvation.
What was the cause of the Great Hunger (or in Irish, An Gorta Mór)? Plenty of historians, especially those with sympathies for Irish nationalism, have often blamed the malicious and ignorant actions of the British government for the horrors Ireland endured. This is for good reason, as the British government’s pitiful response to the crisis is well-documented.
Yet, this horrific event may not merely be a relic of the past. In his 2025 book, Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, historian Padraic X. Scanlan (associate professor at the University of Toronto) details the environmental conditions and economic policies that led to the Irish famine. By recounting the exploitative policies of extraction and the meager, heavily means-tested response by the British government to the crisis, Scanlan shows us that the conditions that led to the Irish famine are not merely contained to the past, but also find eerie echoes in our present.
Overview:
In Scanlan’s tightly-argued account, while the destruction of the potato crop across Europe was caused by blight (in the form of Phytophthora infestans) carried upon merchant ships from the Americas, the resulting starvation and famine had a more systemic cause. Tracing the history of land development and ownership, the exportation of resources, and Britain’s strict adherence to the principles of laissez-faire economics, Scanlan posits that the famine can be blamed on the consequences of colonial capitalism.
Even though Ireland had been absorbed into the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 19th century, Scanlan illustrates how the English looked down upon the Irish as lazy and “uncivilized,” all the while siphoning their precious natural resources, such as cattle, sheep, dairy, and grains. After centuries of subjugation, conquest, and colonization, rural Ireland was made up of a majority of agrarian Catholics, while Irish and English Protestants held a majority of the land. Thus, Irish Catholics were increasingly exploited by their Protestant counterparts, which made them almost wholly dependent on the potato for sustenance (along with pigs, which were mostly sold, rather than eaten, and peat, which served as a source of fuel).
Due to these conditions, the Irish were particularly susceptible to endemic diseases and famine, as they heavily relied on a single crop for survival. Thus, when the blight struck Europe and its potato yields, Ireland bore the brunt of its effects, leading to mass starvation. The Conservative government in Parliament initially took on a paternalistic sympathy for the Irish, importing maize from the Americas and setting up work programs. These small efforts, even as largely ineffective as they were, came to an end with the election of a new party to the seat of power in Parliament: the Whigs.
They believed that any problem could be solved with the principles of laissez-faire capitalism and that giving free aid to the Irish would make them dependent on the government. The Whigs did nothing to stop the mass exportation of food from Ireland, and the small amount of food given to the Irish was primarily for their cattle, which was then exported back to England. They also applied strict means-testing in the distribution of aid, only offering it to those who owned almost no land. This forced Irish farmers to sell what little they had to (mostly British Protestant) landlords to receive any help, which was still meager and insufficient.
While many countries raised considerable donations for the Irish, it was not nearly enough to make a dent in the crisis. Meanwhile, the Whiggish British government believed that this was further evidence that the Irish lacked moral character, and following Malthusian logic, that the population decline would ultimately be good for the Irish economy. This blind faith in the morality of the free market led to the needless suffering and mass death of millions of Irish men, women, and children.
Additionally, Scanlan argues that the conditions that led up to the famine are all too familiar in our current era. He writes,
Ireland before the famine, however, more closely resembled capitalism’s future than its past. Irish laborers were paid some of the lowest wages in the British empire, and they relied on the abundance of the potato to survive. 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. (26)
In an environment where food supplies are increasingly threatened by the ravaging effects of climate change, the unequal development and distribution of wealth between the Global North and South, and an increasingly volatile global economy, we can find many parallels between ourselves and the conditions that led to the Irish famine.
Deeper Dive:
In Chapter One, Scanlan describes the political and economic conditions of the century and a half leading up to the famine. Although Ireland was conquered and declared a kingdom by Henry VIII in 1542, it was still ruled as a colony, as agricultural resources such as meat and butter would be extracted from the island with little capital investment in return. He also details the anti-Catholic Penal Laws that were established in 1695, which limited Catholics from owning land. By the 18th century, Catholics (who made up 80% of the population) owned only 5% of land, as they were limited to small plots of no more than one acre. Even when these Penal Laws were eventually loosened, these discriminatory legal codes were adjusted to keep Protestants and only the wealthiest of Catholics within the sphere of power (such as tying voting rights to the value of land that one owns).
Ireland was absorbed into the creation of the United Kingdom through the Acts of Union in 1800. Yet, despite being an equal and partner nation on paper, the British still treated Ireland as a colony and held contempt for the Irish for their supposedly backward and immoral character. Scanlan writes, “Ireland was misperceived as an anachronism, a place before capitalism that was poor and hungry because of its distance from the market. However, the very opposite was true: the Irish countryside was mired in British imperial capitalism, which was the source of its despair, not the solution to it” (93-94). As such, even though the famine was caused by a biological agent, the extent of the death and devastation it wrought was predicated on centuries of social degradation and economic exploitation.
Chapter Two continues this analysis by examining the economic conditions of early 19th-century Ireland. By the middle of the 19th century, over 80% of the land within Ireland was held by less than four thousand people. These were mostly descendants of the English Protestants and Scottish settlers who seized Catholic land in the 17th century during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Most of them were absentee landlords who primarily lived in England, and they rented their land to Catholic farmers for exorbitant rates. In order to pay rent, these farmers would sublet portions of the land they rented to propertyless laborers.
These tiny parcels of land (often a quarter of an acre) could house entire families, which survived by planting potatoes on this land. The potatoes grown on these small strips of land could feed an entire family, and by the time of the famine, over 25% of the population relied entirely on the potatoes that they grew on this ever-shrinking availability of land. As Scanlan argues, “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 seventeenth century“ (125). This made the Irish poor particularly vulnerable to the dangers of environmental changes and crop failures.
In the Third Chapter, Scanlan pivots from his historical reconstruction to analyze the material scaffolds that supported the economic, social, and moral structure of 19th-century Irish society. In particular, Scanlan examines the importance of this three-legged stool upon which Irish society rested: potatoes, pigs, and peat. First, the potato was an inexpensive and surprisingly nutritious crop that could be produced on small plots of land or lazy beds. Potatoes were hardy crops and could be grown utilizing a variety of techniques. Thus, while other commodities, such as cattle, grains, and sheep were being shipped off to England for low prices, the Irish had little other choice but to rely on the potato for the majority of their sustenance.
While most people today would consider pigs to be a viable source of food, especially in times of famine, the pig was a central feature of Irish life. Rather than cooking a pig for a few meals, pigs were much more valuable to sell on the market. Thus, they served more as a way to store money for future purchases rather than food. Additionally, pigs were often kept within the house, as building pigpens could potentially raise the value of the land they were on, which would raise the price of rent due to land speculation. Finally, peat--decayed organic matter in wetlands and bogs that are a result of deforestation--served as a main fuel source for burning. This turf could also be sold for small amounts of money, which caused a further stripping of the natural landscape.
Chapter Four is primarily concerned with the political mechanisms that directly contributed to the severity of the famine. He recounts the formation of the Liberal Party as a coalition between Whigs, the separatist Peelites, and the loosely organized Radicals, and how ideological political motivations influenced Parliament’s policy toward Ireland more than actual material realities. Britons believed that famine might actually be good for the Irish, bringing them into civilization through diversification and expansion of markets that would eventually solve the Irish problem. Led by British treasury official Charles Edward Trevelyan, they thought that any intervention or deviations in the machinations of the free market would disrupt economic and moral development, and so they unflinchingly cut direct aid in favor of trying to modernize Irish production. This, as we see, did not work.
In Chapter Five, Scanlan recounts the worst era of the famine, which has commonly been called Black ‘47, as starvation starts to grip the island of Ireland, particularly in the south and west. He describes the British government’s meager response to the enormity of the crisis, such as initiating a public works program that was filled with far too much bureaucracy rather than providing direct aid. Parliament feared that the Irish would become too dependent on government assistance, and so they conditioned relief and aid to labor requirements, often forcing workers to do meaningless work for mere pittance.
As such, even when direct aid was given in the form of donations and the organization of soup kitchens, it was heavily means-tested and often woefully inadequate. Despite the praise that the British press gave to celebrity chefs such as Soyer, who bragged about feeding millions in his innovative soup kitchens, the soup was often incredibly thin and low on nutritional benefits. As Scanlan writes, “Soyer proved he could do more with less—an achievement appealing to any government but acutely appealing to an austerity government in a financial crisis. Still, the Irish poor needed food, not demonstrations of culinary finesse or economy. They needed more” (204-205, emphasis original). He describes the humiliating experience of traveling for miles, waiting in line while the wealthy paid sixpence to watch you eat, and being served a small, incredibly thin bowl of soup that was not nearly nutritious enough. All the while, Britons patted themselves on the back for feeding such a large number of people with such few ingredients, even though it was not nearly enough.
Likewise, despite donations flowing into the country from around the world, donors soon grew impatient with the consistently bleak conditions on the island, which fed into the stereotypes of ungrateful and backward Irish folk. Some began to see Ireland as either an endless money pit or a lost cause, while others thought that the Irish were taking advantage of aid. These factors easily lend credence to the stereotype of Ireland as a backwater country full of lazy and uncivilized people. Despite the beautiful display of solidarity that was displayed, such as the donations raised from the Native American Choctaw tribe and African Americans, the sheer scale of the crisis could not be matched by piecemeal charity. Scanlan writes, “There are more than a few books celebrating how the world gave to Ireland. But charity is provisional and temporary, a matter of marketing as much as need, and the problems in Ireland were structural. The solution, if there was one, was more than cash donations” (208).
Chapter Six recounts the final years of the famine, up until 1852. While the bulk of deaths had already occurred, hunger persisted and many were left destitute and emiserated. To add to this suffering, mass evictions became widespread as a solution for English landlords to recover the value of their land that had been curtailed during the famine. As a result, thousands of poor Irish were kicked out of their homes and left without any legal or economic recourse. As a result of these conditions, “outrages” (agrarian violence toward landlords) became more widespread, sparking political and social movements for change. While these rebellions and acts of violence were ultimately quelled or brutally repressed, it is in this era that we begin to see the idea of Irish nationalism and a Celtic identity begin to take shape, setting the stage for separatist movements that would eventually lead to independence in 1916.
In the Epilogue, Scanlan recounts London’s Great Exhibition in 1851, which served as a celebration of the British empire while the famine was still ravaging Ireland. He connects the Great Hunger to two other famines on the periphery of the British Empire in India in 1837 and 1899 (serving as bookends to Queen Victoria’s reign). He reiterates the position that the famine had a proximate cause in the centuries of extraction, exploitation, and underdevelopment before the famine and the undying belief that the free market would solve it once it occurred. Scanlan concludes, “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-conceived ideas, proven unfit for purpose in practice…The empire could conceive of no other useful tools to meet the crisis than the principles of the free market and the workhouse” (261, 263). He finds that these ideological commitments have not faded away, but are still prominent in many of the policies that we see today, providing a foreboding prediction for a future threatened by environmental catastrophe.
Commendations:
Scanlan's account has several notable strengths. First, while academic in structure, the language that Scanlan employs throughout the text is accessible to a general audience. It is heavily researched and combines an impressive array of both primary and secondary sources to undergird his central argument. While there is a steady undercurrent of anger that resides beneath the surface of the text (rightly so!), it never boils over into outright polemics. Scanlan manages to offer a blistering critique of the actions and inaction of the British by remaining even-keeled. He simply lays out the evidence without ever simplifying or downplaying the complex web of policies that led to mass death and emigration.
Additionally, this book serves as a scathing critique of the British Empire and its culpability in exacerbating the Irish famine. He argues that the blight was initially devastating due to structures within Ireland that were already in decay due to the actions of the British Empire. The sheer scale of the suffering of millions of Irish can be traced to the deep faith in capitalism as the only solution for social problems, even in the midst of immediate catastrophe and devastation. Scanlan stops just short of labeling the famine an outright genocide, in which he agrees with most historians in rejecting the label due to a lack of evidence of active intent on the part of the British government. Instead, he argues that it was gross negligence and blind dedication to the principles of free markets that caused Irish suffering, rather than an active attempt to eradicate the Irish population (19). Personally, I am more critical of how international law defines “intent” (and the ambiguity therein) as a prerequisite to genocide, and I do think that the available evidence from British authorities leans more in favor of classifying the Great Hunger as an act of genocide. However, while the Irish Famine may not be considered a genocide by the strict standards of the United Nations, Scanlan’s account gives the reader plenty to consider when thinking about the foundations and implications of genocide and how explicit intent doesn’t erase the horrific impact of one’s actions.
One of the greatest strengths of Rot is its deeply materialist frame of analysis. Scanlan dives headfirst into the raw numbers of shipping exports, land rents, taxes, and the machinations of the British colonial economy to set up a thoroughly materialist explanation for the famine. When combined with his environmental analysis of the blight and its impact on northern Europe, Scanlan’s account is a robust explanation of both the biological cause of the famine and the political will that made it so deadly.
More than just critiquing the British Empire, Scanlan’s account offers a searing indictment of the myth of the free market leading to prosperity. He illustrates the contrast between a culture of abundance, rather than one of scarcity that is the predicate of capitalist economics. The folly of the morality of free markets is a central theme of this book, as Scanlan aptly describes the dangers of blind faith to the principles of lassiez faire capitalist economics over human need. Highlighting the deleterious effects of colonialism and an undying faith in the free market to solve the crisis, he writes, “The Great Famine rehearsed in Ireland many of the most destructive consequences of capitalist modernity: colonialism, exploitation, ecological disaster, sudden and panicked mass emigration, heedless destruction and exploitation giving way to expulsion—all in the name of purifying market forces” (265). By highlighting the role of class and the religious divides that often serve as its ideological cover, Scanlan provides a persuasive and cogent account.
Furthermore, Scanlan brilliantly points out that the Irish famine was not the only one to occur on the British Empire’s watch. In the Epilogue, he describes two famines that occurred in India in 1837 and 1899. This example highlights that even as Ireland was technically a part of the United Kingdom at this point in history, it was still very much treated as an inferior colony right across the Irish Sea. It also stresses the importance of analyzing how these conditions of mass exploitation and the siphoning of natural resources further consolidated wealth within the imperial core of the British Empire while immiserating those at the periphery. He points out how in the Bihar famine of 1874, mass death was largely avoided by the insistence of Sir Richard Temple to provide direct aid, which was highly criticized at the time for breaking away from free-market principles.
Accordingly, Scanalan also warns that many of the attitudes that exacerbated the severity of the famine still linger within our political discourses today. While we typically see famines as relegated either to the past or the Global South, it is still very much a product of capitalist exploitation. The precarity that comes from short-term land rentals, fluctuating food supplies at the whims of the market, shrinking wages in relation to the cost of living, and the rise of protectionless gig work and mass unemployment all create vulnerabilities that can too easily spill over into catastrophe for the vast majority of workers. Especially in the face of climate catastrophe, Scanlan’s account calls us to detach ourselves from this narrow dogmatic adherence to free-market principles in favor of more humanitarian and socially-oriented policies.
Finally, Scanlan stresses the importance of solidarity across national borders in response to the famine. Despite the British government’s horrid response, donations to the Irish came in from across the globe, most notably from other dispossessed communities, such as African Americans and Native American tribes. These communities intimately recognized and sympathized with the plight of the Irish under colonial rule, and their actions fostered long-standing solidarity between these communities. For example, in response to the COVID-19 crisis that struck the Navajo community particularly hard, the Irish donated nearly 2 million dollars for their relief efforts. The bonds of solidarity between these historically marginalized and oppressed groups remain strong, and it is heartening to see it highlighted in this volume.
Critique:
There are only a few small weaknesses in Scanlan’s work. First, even though it is relatively accessible to the non-historian, the text can be a bit repetitive and dry in places. MAny of the chapters overlap in content and theme, and sometimes the narrative flow of the text can be interrupted and slowed down significantly by Scanlan recounting the hyper-specific details of policies. As such, the chapters can meander a but, losing the tightly-argued quality of much of the rest of the book.
Additionally, some chapters require at least a passing familiarity with 19th-century British politics, especially in the Fourth Chapter. For example, Scanlan throws the reader in the middle of the contentious debates and fractures within the British parliament in the mid-19th century, including the formation of the Liberal Party out of a coalition between the Whigs, Peelites, and Radicals against their enemies, the Tories. The political machinations and specific policies regarding the leases on landed property can easily meld together and go over the average reader’s head, especially if they have no background in the politics and economics of the era.
Conclusion:
Overall, Rot is a persuasive and forceful condemnation of the dogmatic faith that the British possessed in free market capitalism to solve the hunger crisis in Ireland. While occasionally dry and repetitive in places, Scanlan’s work uncovers the roots of the Great Famine: imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. As such, it serves as a timely reminder of how a stubborn embrace of political and economic ideology can often blind us to the real needs that exist in our world today.
Today, climate change is making extreme weather more common and sustained leading countless agricultural communities to face similar struggles. Just as in Ireland, farmers on the margins are increasingly facing starvation, malnutrition, and disease due to global weather patterns, for which they bear little responsibility. Likewise, today, our Western hegemonic powers are beholden to a belief in the infallibility of the free market. Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of our age, in which the concentration of wealth is held in the hands of the few, while the vast majority of the world lives in immiseration and precarity.
Conservative and liberal politicians alike are all still beholden to the dogma of free-market capitalism, often cutting aid of social safety nets and welfare programs under the guise of keeping people from “becoming dependent on the government.” Refugees fleeing from the violence and hostile environment wrought by global capitalism and the climate crisis have become the scapegoats of modern society, as they are pinned with a litany of fantasies that justify violence and hatred against them. These prominent attitudes proliferate amidst the crumbling hegemony of Western capitalism, which has once again led to the rise of far-right ideology and expansionist, imperial, and austerity-focused policies. History shows that this will inevitably lead to disaster. Thus, Scanlan’s account serves as a timely warning against such attitudes that threaten to plunge the world further into chaos and mass death, especially in the face of an ever-increasingly unpredictable and hostile climate.