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.

Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot, thoroughly factual and staidly dispassionate, is built-to-order for serious students of European history. It’s a masterful dissection of the origins, advance, and tragic consequences of the Irish Potato Famine, which reached its devasting apogee between 1846 and 1849.

But be prepared. If you’re looking for the story-friendly cushioning of more popularly oriented best-seller candidates, you won’t find that sort of tumble-forward, narrative pacing here. Professor Scanlan’s book bristles with facts, statistics, and dogged scholarship—often delivered with raw, firehose intensity, but only a modicum of attention to graceful presentation.

By most estimates, the famine left a million Irish dead of starvation (out of a population estimated at 5-7 million). In its aftermath the pestilence compelled another million and more Irish working people (including every one of this reviewer’s forebears) to leave the country. Their destinations: mainly the U.S., though others set out for Canada, Australia, and England itself.

The responsible pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, arrived in Europe in 1845, likely from Mexico, making landfall in Belgium. A ‘late’ agricultural pestilence, meaning the disease it caused struck when the growing season was well advanced, causing ripe potato tubers—both in the ground and after harvest—to deliquesce into a black, odiferous, and inedible mush. The disease afflicted potato (and some tomato) crops all over Western Europe.

Ironically in Ireland the blight was only marginally more extensive in its reach. But in terms of its human toll it was far more devasting and intractable there for a welter of socio-political reasons. Scanlan brilliantly enumerates the basis and the extent of these tragic outcomes.

To understand the blight’s impact on the Irish populace, we need to reach back to the 17th century, when England’s Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, inflicted a bloody conquest on Ireland, imposing his final solution on a century of off-and-on conflict between the agrarian Irish and the invading English. The victorious Cromwell redistributed all land in Catholic Ireland among largely Protestant English and Scottish landlords, stripping land ownership from the native people. Many of these newly created landlords were absentee owners, and Irish farmers were forced to rent small plots from them if they wanted to continue raising their potato crops. Over the years, many of these foreign landowners subdivided their demesnes into smaller and smaller parcels, many as tiny as a quarter acre or less. Meanwhile the rents demanded per unit of land continued to rise.

You may be surprised to learn that, by the time of the famine, Ireland was no longer an English colony, having been integrated into the newly established United Kingdom in 1801. This occurred with little say from the native population, and with no change in land ownership policies. And the shoddy treatment—some say persecution-- of Irish Catholics continued. Irish folk who cultivated crops, the bulk of the population, were subsistence farmers working tiny plots in thrall to their largely overseas overlords. While arguably corrupt and indisputably inequitable, this imbalance remained in force until the Phytophthora i. plague hit. [Most of Ireland later broke away from England in the 1920s.]

So why the inordinately catastrophic impact of the plague in Ireland? The Irish population, more so than any other European underclass, had become nearly entirely dependent for sustenance on the potatoes they raised. The remarkable productivity and (yes) nutritional content of the crop allowed the people—even on the tiniest of plots—to feed very large families (a source of condescending ridicule by wags across the Irish Sea). Many native families could also keep a hog or two and sell off a few piglets every year to realize cash to pay their steadily rising rents.

But in 1846 the bottom fell out. Parents and children went homeless, or were sent off to workhouses, or starved to death, their corpses rotting in ditch and byway. Alternatively, they could take ship for new lives overseas, with sea captains charging rock-bottom fares because they could cram the refugees into their holds as ballast, because they were cheaper to load and transport than rocks.

And the role of the English government in these tragic events? Professor Scanlan exhaustively charts the actions of two successive English governments in responding to the disaster, with both falling woefully short, as history testifies. But make no mistake: the response from London was not entirely callous. Some English administrators and politicians—and even some landlords—responded with heartfelt efforts to improve the lot of the Irish, but for the most part the governmental response was a mix of blindly ineffective measures (including the infamous workhouses) and an underlying prejudice against Paddy’s seemingly inherently lazy and drunken habits, and his very un-Protestant propensity for wanton procreation.

Professor Scanlan makes the case against British management of the famine with a torrent of brilliantly researched facts. With a stunning wealth of argumentation, he delivers a knockout punch.

(Actual rating: 4.5 stars)
Most people would probably not jive with this book since it leans more towards the academic side. As an amateur historian and social studies educator, a book like this falls right into my wheelhouse. The author did an excellent job handling this significant event from a comprehensive angle while maintaining a chronological structure to the narrative. I also found several striking quotes that have unfortunate resonance to situations in current events. Whenever that happens, the narrative rises in my opinions and makes for a fulfilling personal reading experience. Additionally, I appreciate the fact that this narrative expanded my understanding of the Irish potato famine significantly, making me realize that my previous understanding was significantly simplistic. I highly recommend this book.

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

This is a very detailed and very well written description of the 1850’s famine which killed or displaced millions of Irish people. We might know that it was because of a potato blight, we might even know that Britain was somehow involved, but what Padraic X. Scanlan does so brilliantly is lay it all out. There is the full historical journey that gets us to that hideous time.

It’s easy to dismiss the Irish as ‘backward’ or ‘self destructive’ but it’s clear that the story is more nuanced and that the British people in power did not value the lives of their Irish citizens as highly as they did those in mainland England.

After reading this, I understand so much more about historical hate and the damage that is carried through generations.

An excellent book.

I was given a copy of the book by NetGalley

Good writing, popular science, and history! Woot!

Good history of a linkage of plant health and human politics.

The Irish famine of the 1840s and 1850s is known but dimly to American schoolchildren. If I am representative of domestic education on the subject, we are taught that it was hard for poor Irish to find food, so they came to New York. This is not wrong, but it masks much — for example, although I was vaguely conscious that Ireland grew potatoes, I was certainly not taught that thousands of Irish farmers then subsisted almost entirely on potatoes. When an underground fungus ruined harvest upon harvest and the farmers had no food in reserve, as most non-potato crops were shipped to England, devastation followed. The ancestors of today's welfare laws were brutal, means-testing hungry families into violence, cannibalism, and the indignity of stone-breaking in hellish workhouses.

Padraic Scanlan's Rot is a history of that time. Scanlan's twin bugaboos of colonialism and capitalism perform a little too much work, though. It is one thing to say that starving peasants had to debase themselves utterly to obtain a pittance of bad American maize; quite another to lay all blame at the feet of the only system known to have lifted millions out of destitution over millennia. What is incontestable is that certain of the English elite fetishized abstract ideas like the free market and saw the Irish as backward playthings.

Could an epic tragedy such as the Irish famine reoccur? Potentially it could: as Scanlan observes, the famine we all (sort of) know was neither the first nor the last of its kind. But it also took place in an era of slow-moving news. The English rarely visited Ireland even for tourism, they had their own problems, and what media there were blamed the Irish for their indolence, their drunkenness, their obsession with the lowly potato.

Since then, not only has the media landscape been transformed with the advent of smartphones and the internet, but welfare payments have been rechristened "entitlements" that cannot be taken away absent due process. And whence come these lifesaving monies? Certainly not from economic competition that incentivizes moneymaking. Certainly not from capitalism.

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.