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.