Never have I read a book that more clearly places the blame for the fallout of the potato famine squarely on the British government and its practically religious belief in free market capitalism. Padraic paints a vivid picture of Ireland and Britain throughout the course of the first half of the 19th century, and the societal structures that led to this disaster: Britain's categorization of civilized vs uncivilized based on how well a people are able to adjust to British imposed free market capitalism that is highly colonial and extractive, just as neo-colonialism and modern capitalism is today for the global south. He discusses the subhuman ways in which the Irish were described, and the mockery British media and government officials used to vilify the Irish and their dependence on potatoes before the blight, a dependence that only existed due to the extractive nature of the relationship between Irish agriculture/farming and the British economy. These ideas convinced those that knew nothing about Ireland that the problem wasn't too much exposure to capitalist markets, but too little, giving them all the excuse they needed to avoid and deny providing any form of relief, and for ending what relief was given as early as possible. The consequence: at least a million dead, another million banished from their home, and no real reckoning of who or what to blame other than the "lazy Irish" themselves.

At the end of the book, Padraic hammers the point home that British capitalist ideology, and their colonial views of civilized and uncivilized peoples is what caused a blight to become a famine by examining the much more catastrophic famines that took place in British India. He also notes the one time Britain successfully avoided mass death from famine by breaking away from dogmatic free market ideology (the man in charge, Sir Richard Temple, was harshly criticized for his actions that saved colonial subjects from starvation).

The final important piece of this book is the parallels Padraic draws between the 19th and 21st centuries, both in terms of how capitalist ideology is enacted and how the causes of famine are discussed. This quote in particular stuck out to me: "...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." Famine, especially today is, for the time being, completely avoidable with the amount of food produced worldwide. Capitalist markets (ideological) and logistics (much more concrete) are all that stands in the way of keeping starvation from taking place. Even the discussions around welfare and housing crises are similar to the 19th century, with British prime ministers demanding labor and hardship in exchange for the bare minimum of relief, and the Irish people continuing to be one of the country's biggest exports, unable to work and live in their home country.

I absolutely devoured this book, constantly writing my own notes as I went along. I could not recommend this enough to anyone who has ever wanted to learn more about these events. I hope Padraic continues to write such well-researched and analyzed books like this in the future. Thank you to Basic Books for providing an advanced copy of this book through NetGalley for my review.

Rot
By Padraic X. scanlan

This book traces the ups and downs of the economy and Ireland’s early life under Great Britain. It provides historical information on how Ireland would export to the Americas to sell their products.

The potato was a symbol of Irelands poor and backwardness, but it also enabled the families to have vitamin rich food that was also able to be used to feed livestock. An early issue for planting more potatoes was the older the seed was, the worse the yield if they kept using the eyes to replant potato. Late blight killed potatoes but no one relied more on potatoes than the poor in Ireland. There had been potato crop problems for decades before the Great Famine.

Starvation one way to control a population. Hundreds of thousands died from starvation and disease after the blight of 1845-1846. Social networks broke down. Soup kitchens came about but the food wasn’t the best, giving people scurvy. Help soon dried up as the crisis continued; many ended up in workhouses or prisons where disease was rampant and conditions terrible. Eventually enough people died or moved that the famine seemed to have been absorbed into daily life once more.

Not much has changed in how we care for those in famine areas. This sobering book will remind us of one such event in history in the hopes we can help those affected in the future.

Thank you NetGalley and Basic Books for the ARC of Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine.

This is a very well researched book, but may be a bit too academic for some. However, I learned so much! It really showed that poverty is a political choice whether it be through inaction or the wrong actions.

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:
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. Incredible, 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.