Rot: A History of the Irish Famine
Padraic X. Scanlan, London: Robinson, 2025, 340pps., hb., £25
Sometimes great matters can turn on – vegetables. Ancient civilization was founded on the ‘simple’ discovery that grasses could become grains, reliable and storable – allowing the emergence of fixed ‘Fertile Crescent’ cities with rulers and philosophers. But vegetables can also wield disaster. The failure of the Irish potato crop in the mid-1840s not only brought terrible suffering to that island but has blighted Anglo-Irish relations ever since. No other episode has left so toxic an after-taste, with over 100 memorials around the world, and countless cultural references.
Canadian historian Padraic X. Scanlan has Irish antecedents, and generally ‘left-of-centre’ views. This is nevertheless a careful analysis of one of England’s un-finest hours. He has steeped himself not only in the cultivation, mythology and natural history of Solanum tuberosum, but also the cultural, economic, industrial, mercantile and political currents which combined to heap such horrors on the luckless 1840s Irish. He shows that what is often portrayed as a ‘medieval’ style catastrophe was in fact a ‘modern’ one, a predictable product of a dynamic century – and furthermore offers insights for our world of economic insecurities, environmental destruction, and ever-evolving pathogens.
Sometime in 1844 or 1845, a cargo of seed potatoes from America was offloaded somewhere in Europe. Unfortunately, that cargo contained an unobtrusive mould called Phytophthora infestans, which launched itself onto the Old World with alacrity. Potato crops from Spain to Sweden were attacked, causing dearth and deaths, but the direst effects were felt in Ireland, where the population was uniquely dependent on the potato. In 1841, there were some 8.2 million people in Ireland; by 1851, there were 6.5 million, through death by starvation or disease, or forced emigration. Such was the culture-shock that for almost a century afterwards the population of Ireland would continue to decline. The Irish government still issues annual warnings to farmers about the likelihood of blight.
Although Ireland had much fertile land, and was famous for dairy and meat products, millions had been perilously reliant on the potato as early as the 1730s. There had been crop failures before; in 1740-1, the harvest was ruined by weather, and 300,000 died, proportionally more than would die during the Famine. But generally, since its arrival in Tudor times the potato had proved its worth as a cheap, easily grown and highly nutritious staple. The potato, grown and eaten close to home, was furthermore largely insulated from market vagaries of the kind which were for the first time becoming important, with the rise of industry and commodity capitalism. Its cultivation had been encouraged by landlords, because it could feed more workers on less land, leaving acreages open to more lucrative grain or livestock.
This was the unsettling era of Carlyle and Darwin, and 1848’s ‘Year of Revolutions’ which toppled thrones across Europe. There were also radical economic theories, with long-distance communication and trade starting to boom thanks to steam power and the electric telegraph. Laissez-faire was becoming the default economic theory, espoused especially by Whigs – and 1845’s potato failure (followed by failures in 1846 and 1847) coincided with the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws at the hands of Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel, which split his party, but ensconced market thinking.
Westminster’s newfound faith in free trade, and a perceived imperative to ‘modernise,’ made London dreadfully slow to react when the disease struck in Ireland – a tragic failure of imagination. Irish crops which could have helped allay some of the worst effects of the blight were suddenly able to be sold more profitably to England – beeves, cheese, grain and pork grotesquely outward bound from Irish ports even as the emaciated ghost which children called an fear gorta, ‘the hunger man,’ stalked the haunted land.
In 1801, Ireland had become part of the United Kingdom, at least theoretically a partner with England rather than a colony. But Ireland was always different – historically dangerous, and still partially militarised, subject to strict Coercion Acts. ‘The Irish Question’ was a perennial interrogative in Westminster politics, consuming vast amounts of political and administrative time to little effect. Ireland was also mostly Catholic, much poorer, often Irish-speaking, overwhelmingly rural, and thickly populated; in 1845, almost one-third of the UK’s population lived in Ireland.
English administrators, politicians and thinkers often fundamentally misunderstood Irish realities, and projected modern mercantilism onto a population still wedded to older ideas – “the narrow spirit of a counting house,” the agronomist Arthur Young noted disapprovingly. Whiggish writers deplored the customs of funeral wakes, holy days and Lent fasting, which they felt encouraged idleness and irresponsibility. Foreign modernisers too took notice; the German geographer Johann Georg Kohl sneered in 1844 at the tatterdemalion third-hand fancy coats worn pathetically by potato-diggers, and sad women labourers who “mounted their dunghills in a coarse and tattered ball-dress.” The Times likened government support for Catholics to “pearls before swine.” Even William Cobbett, doughty champion of the English agricultural labourer, saw the Irish poor essentially as competitors for scarce resources – almost a race apart, whose food “is but one remove from that of the pig.”
The expression ‘Protestant work ethic’ had not then been coined, but there had always been a prejudice amongst Protestants that Reformed faith correlated with economic efficiency, hard work and prudence. There were vaguely formed but powerfully held notions that certain habits and modes of subsistence were markers of ‘backwardness’ or perversity; Scottish and Welsh fondness for oats was a long-standing English joke. Irish dependence upon potatoes was easy for more insulated English Protestants to see as something like swinishness, caricaturable as the poor diet of a spiritually impoverished and indolent people.
English critics often dismissed Irish pleas of poverty as impudent exaggeration – a “poor mouth” always open in blarneying cajolery. Even when they conceded some truth in Irish claims, it was very easy to shrug problems away as unavoidable, or a regrettable necessity, a teething pain on the road to inevitable modernity – even a necessary corrective.
Charles Trevelyan, the assistant secretary to the Treasury who administered the Irish relief works of 1845-7, was a well-meaning Liberal, but saw the blight as “some great intervention of Providence to bring the potato back to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as a principal article of national food.” Thomas Malthus thought poverty relief would lead to even greater overpopulation, and delay necessary reform of the Irish character. Famine, he wrote, was “the most dreadful resource of nature.” The ‘invisible hand’ of the market was supposed to tip the balance eventually, with imports taking the place of the potato, but even when American maize started to arrive, it was insufficient, and many districts missed out because of poor distribution.
Sometimes caricatures of the Irish tipped over into venom, exemplified in cartoons in the bestselling magazine Punch, in which Irish people were portrayed as semi-simian shillelagh-carriers, living in “Ballymuckandfilth,” addicted to obscurantist religion, potatoes and poteen. When some starving Irish took (understandably enough) to violence, it was even easier to demonise the country in toto. Most violence was apolitical in nature, but the Famine did lead directly to the ‘Young Ireland’ armed uprising of 1847, and fuelled Irish-American resentments for generations to come. Terrible stories of desperate parents selling their children, and cannibalism, did little to elevate the Irish in appalled or averted English eyes.
The government did make attempts to alleviate suffering, with a public works programme and soup-kitchens, but these were slow to start and always half-hearted, subject to fiscal and political pressures. Bankers like the Barings gave generously as individuals to Famine relief programmes, even as their institutions were pressuring the government to spend less on everything. Skeletal men and women were expected to work in return for rations, as the medieval concept of unconditional charitable assistance was replaced by a merciless wage-ethic.
The most efficacious attempts at relief were made by private individuals and charities, including Queen Victoria, who gave £2,000 – and there were also some touching donations, from London police constables, Welsh ironworkers, the Choctaw Nation, even slaves in Alabama. Protestant charities that ran soup-kitchens were frequently suspected of making aid conditional on conversion from Catholicism. There is little evidence of this, but it was nevertheless met with defiant legend-making; Scanlan was told as a boy that the Scanlon spelling of their surname signified those who had swapped their principles for Protestant pabulum. What was true was that those who applied to soup kitchens were means-tested to see if they were indigent enough to qualify.
There were good landlords, and gallant clergy and gentlefolk who lost their lives by going into typhus-and cholera-filled hospitals to help. But there were other landlords, usually absentees who rarely visited their estates, who continued to pursue debt recovery, evictions, and ‘improvements’ even in the depths of the disaster. By the summer of 1847, Trevelyan felt able to declare that the Famine was no longer a national crisis, even as thousands continued to die or flee abroad. In 1848, he was made Knight Commander of the Bath as a reward for his labours. He has ever since been cast as the villain of the piece.
Yet none of what happened during the Famine was really anyone’s fault, at least according to contemporaneous opinion, as encapsulated by the author: “When the system functioned, it was civilization. When it broke down, it was Providence.” Personal responsibility, we can see, was also farmed out during those years in favour of ‘historical forces’ – yet another way in which the Famine can be seen as resolutely ‘modern.’ This well-written account reminds us how the most awful events can occur through simple indifference.
This review appeared in the January 2026 issue of Chronicles, and is reproduced with permission