Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 - one of the twelve 'most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books'. 'A vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine . . . Richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship.' Fintan O'Toole'A vivid, polemical narrative that does justice to victims and explains the ideologies that worsened the disaster.' Irish Independent'Scanlan's history of the 'Great Hunger' and its repercussions is meticulous, measured and damning.' Financial Times'Mr. Scanlan's haunting and terrible book is undoubtedly a history title of the year.' Wall Street JournalIn the 1800s, as Britain became the world's most powerful industrial empire, Ireland starved. The Great Famine fractured long-held assumptions about political economy and 'civilisation', threatening disorder in Britain. Ireland was a laboratory for empire, shaping British ideas about colonisation, population, ecology and work.In Rot, Padraic Scanlan reinterprets the history of this time and the result is a revelatory account of Ireland's Great Famine. In the first half of the nineteenth century, nowhere in Europe - or the world - did the working poor depend as completely on potatoes as in Ireland. To many British observers, potatoes were evidence of a lack of modernity among the Irish. However, Ireland before the famine more closely resembled capitalism's future than its past. While poverty before and during the Great Famine was often blamed on Irish backwardness, it did in fact stem from the British Empire's embrace of modern capitalism. Uncovering the disaster's roots in Britain's deep imperial faith in markets and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Famine and its tragic legacy.

A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland's most infamous disaster."Vigorous and engaging." -Fintan O'Toole, The New Yorker In 1845, European potato fields were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland that the blight's devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers a new account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland's place in the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland's overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. And when famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Uncovering the disaster's roots in Britain's deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.