Description
A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Irelands most infamous disaster
In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blights devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.
In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Irelands place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Irelands overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empires laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Irelands wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empires embrace of modern capitalism.
Uncovering the disasters roots in Britains deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.
Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 03/11/2025
Pages: 352
Size: 9.50h x 6.25w x 1.17d
ISBN: 9781541601543
Language: English
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