Rot

In 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.

About the Author

Padraic X. Scanlan earned a BA (Hons) in History from McGill University in 2008, and a PhD in History from Princeton University in 2013. He is Associate Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University. He is the author of Freedom's Debtors, which, in 2018, was awarded the James A. Rawley Prize and the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, and Slave Empire.