This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
There have been many famines in Irish history, but there is only one Famine, a national catastrophe which from 1845 until 1852 killed at least a million people, forced another one and a half million to leave their homeland and poisoned Anglo-Irish relations forever. Yet, almost two centuries later, many aspects of the Famine remain the subject of scholarly debate, whilst the gulf between popular and academic interpretations of the event is as wide as ever.
Rot: A History of the Irish Famine promises to be, according to its publisher, “the definitive account of the Great Famine”. The central argument by the Canadian historian Padraic X. Scanlan is that the Famine was “a crisis of ideas as well as policy”. Phytophthora infestans, the “rot” of the book’s title, caused more mayhem in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe because of British elites’ fanatical embrace of free market, laissez-faire dogmas, which distorted Ireland’s moral and political economy in ways which made it uniquely vulnerable to the disease and which shaped Britain’s ineffective response to the Famine. To Scanlan, the Great Famine was a product of capitalist modernity, existing on the same intellectual continuum as the “austerity” policies of 21st century governments.
The American, though not the British, edition of Rot is subtitled “An Imperial History of the Irish Famine”, which may or may not say something about both markets’ appetite for yet another book about British imperialism. But empire is not a major part of Scanlan’s story.
True, he begins his first chapter not in Ireland but in Ceylon, where we find Irish officers toasting both the King and Ireland on St Patrick’s Day, 1823. (Since the festivities occurred two decades before the Famine, it’s unclear what they are meant to illustrate, except that the Irish were highly competent imperialists.)
Yet this ornamental scene is never followed up with any conviction, despite the occasional discussion of India. To his great credit, Scanlan rejects the idea that Ireland was a British colony, even if aspects of its governance were clearly colonial. In any event, despite an endorsement from Sathnam Sanghera on its cover, Rot is for the most part free from the imperial Kulturkampf which has poisoned the pages of so many recent books on British history.
Whilst the stylised potatoes on the cover (translucent blue for the British edition) have a hint of radicalism to them, Rot is surprisingly old-fashioned in many respects. Scanlan writes in an elegant, detached prose, the paragraphs dripping with historical statistics and price data. His footnotes are crammed with references to royal commission reports (the source of many of his stories about Irish society) and contemporary newspaper articles, as well as the voluminous secondary literature on the Famine — not quite a real “history from below”.
Because of his emphasis on its structural causes, Scanlan, in common with Irish “revisionist” historians of the Famine, rejects much of the nationalist mythology that has grown around it. He dismisses the notion that the Famine was a deliberate starvation crime perpetrated against the Irish by British officials: they did not, in fact, want the Irish to die, and the government borrowed so heavily to finance famine relief that it provoked a banking crisis.
Nor does he have much sympathy for the notion that the Irish agrarian “outrages” constituted proto-acts of national resistance, since their victims were often fellow Irishmen as destitute as the perpetrators. Even Sir Charles Trevelyan, the arch-villain of so many histories of the Famine, gets off lightly, with Scanlan preferring to portray him as simply another mental prisoner of the liberal economic dogmas of his times.
In many ways, this is a fine narrative history of the Famine. Scanlan is particularly insightful on the social aspects of 19th century Irish society. Though visitors often saw Ireland as a quasi-medieval and alien place, Scanlan points out that many of the features which gave them that impression were in fact quintessentially modern. The picturesque but miserable cottages which dotted the countryside, for instance, were built in stone because of mass deforestation brought about by British military demand for wood in previous centuries.
He is also very good when it comes to the three legs of the precarious stool which was the basis of Irish rural life: potatoes, pigs and peat. Victorian observers viewed potatoes as an ancient symbol of Irish backwardness, but they only became a dietary staple in the 18th century, partly in response to the country’s greater integration into the wider British economy. Contrary to myth, the average Irishman did not consume 12 pounds of potatoes a day, which would have been impossible. But poor Irish families did really sleep with their pigs, which sometimes attacked their owners and their families with deadly consequences.
However, the book is on shakier ground when it comes to economics, a real drawback when its arguments are so much based on economic history. Some minor howlers are telling: at one point, we are told that “the price of wheat fell nearly 125 per cent”. More seriously, in Scanlan’s single-minded attempt to pin the blame for the Famine on excessive laissez-faire, he exaggerates the extent to which 19th century Ireland was the product of this ideology.
Thus we get a long discussion of the dispossession of Irish landowners and the laws against land ownership and inheritance by Roman Catholics, which heavily distorted Irish land-holding patterns, to the great disadvantage of the vast majority of the Irish people. But we are never invited to consider how these religiously discriminatory measures fit with a liberal, free market ideology, the answer being — of course — very badly.
For similar reasons, Scanlan’s treatment of the repeal of the Corn Laws at the beginning of the Famine is especially anaemic. We are given listless, potted accounts of the debate between Sir Robert Peel and Lord George Bentick, pro and con repeal, a debate which split the Tory party and kept it out of power for a generation. But although Scanlan argues that the ferocity of the debate on repeal drowned out “the question of whether free trade in grain would actually benefit Ireland”, it is not a question he seems interested in answering, despite its obvious importance for any assessment of the British official response to the Famine.
Neither does he address the fact that the Corn Laws, which both distorted the Irish agricultural economy in a way which made it almost uniquely vulnerable to potato blight and hampered famine relief efforts, could hardly be associated with laissez-faire fundamentalism. But to discuss the Corn Laws in too much detail would presumably undermine Scanlan’s monocausal focus on the evils of unrestricted capitalism, and so the exercise is only attempted half-heartedly.
Scanlan would rather focus on the seeming madness of Irish food exports continuing during the Famine whilst millions were starving, a well-known fact which has long been used to illustrate British callousness. Yet, as the Irish historian Cormac Ó Gráda has shown, all Irish food exports in 1846 and 1847 together equalled no more than one-seventh of the calorific deficit caused by the loss of potato crops, so that an import ban would not have stopped the hunger.
The main problem was not that food was being allocated according to capitalist laissez-faire imperatives but that there simply wasn’t enough food being produced in Ireland to feed everyone.
In such a situation, abolishing trade barriers was obviously the better solution, even though a temporary export ban might have made some difference in the months before cheap foreign corn flooded into Ireland and brought prices down. Scanlan says that export bans and similar measures would have been “fantasies” at the time, so far did they depart from Victorian economic orthodoxies. But they were considered by the likes of Peel, who simply did not believe they would work in the long term and such a view was probably right.
Scanlan has written a serious, highly readable and fair-minded history of the Great Famine, which eschews the rhetorical excesses which characterise so much of the modern discourse on the subject, whilst bringing vividly to the forefront the scale of the catastrophe that afflicted Ireland.
But his single-minded focus on the evils of Victorian political economy, with putative lessons for the 21st century, have led him to some intellectual dead ends. It is not a bad book, but Rot will not be the “definitive account of the Great Famine”.
