Book review: Reinterpreting the Irish Famine as a consequence of unbridled capitalism

The central contention in 'Rot' is that Westminster’s response to the starvation was defined by its overarching commitment to the principles of the free market

Author and historian Padraic X Scanlan’s previous two books dealt with slavery in the British empire.

• Rot: A History of the Irish Famine 
• Padraic X Scanlan 
• Robinson, €20.99 

More than six million visitors attended the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

Held in the cast iron, specially-built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, this global fair showcased the industrial might of the UK, the world’s most powerful economy. 

But it failed to acknowledge the tragedy unfolding within its borders.

During the Great Famine (1845-52), at least 1m people died of starvation in Ireland and about 1.5m fled.

In 1847, Britain’s prime minister, Lord John Russell, likened the spiralling calamity to a “famine of the 13th century”.

For Padraic X Scanlan, this gross juxtaposition of commercial celebration and human catastrophe encapsulates Britain’s ruthless attitude to the Great Famine.

The historian’s central contention in Rot is that Westminster’s response to the starvation was defined by its overarching commitment to the principles of the free market.

Underlining the book’s polemical tone, Scanlan argues that Ireland during the Famine was a laboratory in which the most exploitative aspects of “capitalist modernity” were unleashed.

“The blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields of vulnerable plants,” he writes. 

But the famine — a complex ecological, economic, logistical, and political disaster — was a consequence of colonialism.

The dependence of the working poor on the potato in pre-Famine Ireland was unmatched anywhere in the world.

Many Britons regarded the potato as the source of Irish poverty, associating the food with the lower classes’ innate laziness and lack of civilisation.

This perspective ignored the transformative effect of the land settlement achieved by Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of the country.

In pre-Famine Ireland, about 2.7m people (more than 20% of the population) were landless, while only 4,000 people owned almost 80% of Irish land.

Successive Westminster administrations viewed the Famine through the lens of eliminating Ireland’s dependence on the potato — and an opportunity to civilise its poor.

Charles Trevelyan, a treasury secretary who’s often portrayed as arch villain of the Great Hunger, characterised the humanitarian crisis as a “sharp but effectual remedy” to “cure” the problem of Irish backwardness. 

Tellingly, he published his account of the Famine in 1848, just over halfway through the event.

Scanlan is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Reinterpreting history is a hallmark of the Canadian’s approach and a refrain in the author’s two previous books, both of which focused on the British slave trade.

Scanlan adopts a similar angle in Rot and balances wide research into the politics and economy of Famine Ireland with unsettling closeups of starvation.

From contemporary accounts, we glimpse the extent of the devastation: people eating wild birds’ eggs, rotting carrion, grass, moss, dirt, worms, cats, dogs, and rats.

But his didactic analysis is a blunt instrument to untangle the complexities of the era.

Likewise, Scanlan’s suggestion that current societal problems, such as gaping inequality, exorbitant rents, and insecure employment, echo the anxieties of pre-Famine Ireland is a misstep.

In 1861, the Irish nationalist John Mitchel wrote: “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine”.

Rot revisits the question of British responsibility because “blame matters”.

The British government didn’t intentionally starve Ireland during the Famine, Scanlan admits, but “it was not innocent”.

No country in Europe was affected as profoundly as Ireland by the 1840s potato blight.

In Belgium, the potato failure caused a severe food crisis, but from 1846 to 1856 the population increased by 200,000.

Ultimately, Scanlan identifies the ideologies underpinning Britain’s reaction to the Irish Famine as the lynchpin.

“Colonialism and capitalism created conditions that turned blight into famine.”

Scanlan’s arguments lack the rigour to always convince, but they make Rot a provocative read.