Richard Webb was rector of Caheragh, a village in County Cork. In February 1847 he asked two men he trusted to visit the homes of the poorest families in his parish. It was the second year of famine in Ireland. The potato crop had failed in 1845, and again in 1846. Authorities in Dublin and London, however, believed that the Irish rural poor might be feigning destitution. As Webb’s men made their rounds, farmers told them to avoid a knot of houses at the edge of a certain field. They were typical Irish cottages: drafty and damp, without windows or chimneys, little more than dirt-floor rooms with slimy stone walls and thatched roofs. Those houses are cursed, the farmers warned.
The men Webb had sent heeded the warning. There was enough misery in the village and the surrounding countryside to prove that the Irish poor were not dissembling, that many were starving to death. But Webb was curious. He prevailed on another member of his congregation to go back to the “cursed” cottages and make a report. In a cabbage garden near the cottages, the man found the corpses of a woman named Kate Barry and two of her children half buried in loose soil. Dogs had dug up Barry’s head and legs, ripped the flesh off the skull, and gnawed and cracked the long bones. Barry’s scalp, with her hair attached, was close by. The man at first mistook it for a horse’s tail. In the two small cottages about thirty yards farther from the garden were four more bodies—those of two adults, Norry Regan and Tom Barry, and two children, Nelly Barry and Charles McCarthy. Their corpses had been decomposing for two weeks. Another man, Tim Donovan, had died a few days earlier. His wife and sister, ill with typhus, did not have the strength to move the body or the money to bury it. “I need make no comment on this,” Webb wrote, “but ask, are we living in a portion of the United Kingdom?”1
In 1844 or 1845, Phytophthora infestans crossed the Atlantic. A fungus-like water mould that attacks potato and tomato plants, the pathogen probably arrived in Europe in a shipment of seed potatoes unloaded in Belgium. The disease it causes, now often called late blight because it strikes late in the growing season, spread quickly and virulently. From Sweden to northern Spain the mould killed potatoes in the ground and turned potatoes in storage to stinking pulp. Death rates rose across the continent. And yet nowhere in Europe—or the world—did the poor depend as completely on potatoes as in Ireland. Millions of Irish labourers ate little else. In 1801, after centuries under English control, Ireland had become a partner with Great Britain in a new country, the United Kingdom. By 1845, nearly one-third of the population of the UK lived in Ireland. Union, however, did not reduce Irish dependence on potatoes.
The potato blight caused crisis everywhere it appeared in Europe; in Ireland, it caused an apocalypse. Between 1845 and 1851, at least 1 million people died of famine-related causes. At least 1.5 million more left Ireland as emigrants to Britain, North America, Australia, and elsewhere. The 1841 UK census counted about 8.2 million people in Ireland; ten years later, as the famine was coming to an end, there were about 6.5 million. Ireland’s population would continue to decline for nearly a hundred years.
The blight eventually appeared in all of Ireland’s provinces—Connaught in the northwest, Munster in the southwest, Leinster in the southeast, and Ulster in the northeast—and all its thirty-two counties (further divided into smaller baronies and parishes). Deaths related to famine happened everywhere but were most concentrated in western Connaught, Munster, and the southernmost parts of Ulster. Although the labouring poor ate potatoes throughout northern and western Europe, only Ireland experienced demographic collapse during and after the blight pandemic. In 1845–1846, for example, excess mortality (that is, a rate of death greater than the expected statistical average) in the Netherlands was roughly 2 percent of population, and in Belgium 1.1 percent. And yet in these two countries, which after Ireland were likely the most vulnerable to potato failure, overall population increased by about 200,000 between 1846 and 1856 in Belgium, and by about 130,000 in the Netherlands between 1845 and 1851.2
The consequences of the potato famine were reckoned in more than death and emigration. Years of starvation and disease dissolved bonds of community and family in the hardest-hit parts of Ireland. As two scholars of international law who focus on the use of starvation as a weapon of war explain, with clinical restraint, “the process of destitution degrades not only physical assets but also social bonds.” When a person starves, their body consumes its own muscle and fat, digesting itself to supply energy to vital organs. Parts of a person’s being that seemed permanent and sacrosanct give way to animal need. Starving people can oscillate between apathy and enervation. They can become willing to do things to survive that would be unimaginable and shameful with a full belly.3
This book answers Richard Webb’s plaintive question: Did the Irish poor “live in a portion of the United Kingdom”? By the time the blight pandemic spread to Irish fields, Ireland had been politically, legally, and economically integrated into the United Kingdom for decades. Before the Union, Ireland had been a subordinate sister kingdom to Britain, with its own parliament. Ireland was never a British colony, but “colonialism” is not exclusive to formal colonies. Before and after the Union, and before and after the Great Famine, Ireland was imagined, governed, and exploited in strikingly colonial ways. The blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields of vulnerable plants. But the famine—a complex ecological, economic, logistical, and political disaster—was a consequence of colonialism.
The potato embodied the ambiguities of Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. Some Victorian Britons speculated that the Irish had an irrational racial affinity with the potato, but the hyperdependence of so many of the Irish poor on the crop was an adaptation to English and British conquest, and to the subsequent growth of the British Empire and imperial capitalism. In the seventeenth century—during the wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation and redrew the map of Europe—Ireland, already long under English dominion, was definitively and brutally conquered. English forces seized almost all Irish land remaining in Catholic hands and redistributed it to Protestant loyalists. The English Parliament passed the Penal Laws, which legalised the persecution and dispossession of Catholics and strictly limited Ireland’s political and economic independence.
As the conquest of Ireland proceeded, the potato arrived in Europe among the spoils of the Iberian conquest of Central and South America. Brought to Spain by returning conquistadores, the potato may have been introduced to Ireland by Basque ships stopping for water and provisions before crossing the Atlantic to the cod fisheries off Newfoundland. Potatoes were a welcome backstop against pillaging armies and crop failure, especially of oats and other staple grains. Potatoes cannot be siloed and are difficult to store, but they are nutritious, hardy, adaptable, and can produce generous and reliable yields, even in indifferent soil. Potato cultivation spread quickly and widely in Ireland and across western Europe.4
From the eighteenth century through the early years of the Union, the pressure exerted on the Irish economy by the growth of the British Empire shifted the potato from a fail-safe to a staple. Potatoes could feed more workers on less land, allowing landlords to raise more livestock and grain for export, primarily to colonial markets. When grain was valuable, landlords called for tillage. When speculators were bullish on beef or wool, fields of wheat and oats were flattened to graze cattle and sheep. The shifting market created unstable and insecure employment for many Irish labourers, but potatoes were usually abundant enough for subsistence. Potatoes allowed landlords to hire cheap and plentiful labour to work larger, export-oriented farms while also collecting rent from subdivided and subleased farms and potato grounds. Ironically, although the potato abetted these new forms of exploitation, it also became a symbol for many British commentators of an intractable, essential, and ancient Irish poverty. Irish potato-eaters were condemned, as though they had planted the crop purposely to indulge in unwholesome superstitions, whiskey, and blarney.5
At the end of the eighteenth century, revolutions in North America and France rearranged Ireland’s constitutional relationship to Britain once again. In 1783 the Irish Parliament was restored to a limited independence, in part out of fear of an Irish rebellion in the image of the American Revolution. In 1798, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, a group known as the United Irishmen, inspired by France and led by Protestant intellectuals, rose in rebellion against the Crown. In 1801, the United Kingdom was created, in part to cut off the possibility of a French invasion of Britain from Ireland. Enthusiasts argued that in addition to security, the Union would give Ireland a greater share in British prosperity. British capital would flow to Ireland; Irish grain, dairy, and meat would flow to Britain. The new United Kingdom was a single market, with a single currency. There were no internal borders, tariffs, or obstacles to trade. From 1829, the last of the Penal Laws were repealed and Irish Catholics were restored to most civil rights. But the Union faltered. The joke that Ireland and Britain had not consummated their marriage was cliché on both sides of the Irish Sea.
The growth of the British Empire and the uneven economy of the United Kingdom increased pressure on Irish land but afforded opportunities for Irish labourers willing to leave Ireland. In the seventeenth century, anti-Catholicism had been a dominant ideology in the English Parliament and in England’s colonies. But a growing empire needed workers, and many Britons were able to overcome their scruples. Irish Protestant elites became senior figures in UK and imperial politics; Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington—a war hero and two-time prime minister—is the most prominent example from the era before the Great Famine. As the Irish political and professional classes integrated into the Union, humbler Catholic and Presbyterian Irish soldiers, sailors, settlers, and merchants also served the empire. Irish and British identities intertwined. Irish labourers were subject to British colonialism in Ireland but could serve as its agents abroad.6
After the Union, the Irish upper classes grew closer to their peers in Britain, and Irish farms exported more meat, dairy, and grain. Year on year, the pressure on Irish land increased. Poverty is relative; the Irish poor, by the standards of European peasants in the nineteenth century, were not exceptionally deprived—economic historians have, for example, found that many Irish labourers were able to afford imported goods like tobacco. But the Irish poor were exceptionally vulnerable. The Irish economy, structured by colonialism, was precarious. Demand for Irish exports within the Union built a new façade over rotten boards. Moreover, even within the Union, Ireland remained partially militarised. Ireland was governed by both Parliament and the Crown (like the rest of the Union), but also by an appointed executive, the lord lieutenant, whose position carried over from the era of conquest. Ireland was regularly subject to Coercion Acts, laws that gave the lord lieutenant the power to declare Irish districts “disturbed,” suspend civil liberties and due process, and impose martial law. In the cabinet, the chief secretary of Ireland also had expansive direct power over Irish affairs.7
The potato was a modern crop, native to the Americas and introduced to Ireland. Potato culture became a pillar of Irish life in the eighteenth century, when landlords found potatoes convenient for exploitation and Irish labourers found potatoes useful for survival as Britain consolidated its conquest. And yet, influential British commentators considered potatoes an ancient feature of Irish culture. And since cyclical potato failures were common in Ireland long before 1845, hunger also became “natural” in Ireland, a feature of an Irish landscape and rural economy that was portrayed as archaic, unchanging, and stubbornly resistant to modernity and reform. As one writer commented in 1812, “Everyone who knows Ireland, is convinced that years of scarcity in that country are very frequent.” To colonial eyes, potato shortages threw into relief a primitive, monomaniacal appetite for potatoes among the Irish, as well as fecklessness and disregard for the future. Colonialism is not only material exploitation, or applicable only to distant colonies. In the British Empire, differences between coloniser and colonised became, for many Britons, evidence of British superiority—and a justification for conquest after the fact. A writer in a London periodical speculated, “If the people of England were for only one day to be reduced to the condition in which the population of Ireland have existed for centuries, every institution connected with the preservation of private property in this country would be annihilated within four-and-twenty hours.” The comparisons were clear: Britain was energetic, Ireland was listless; Britain was combative, Ireland was apathetic; Britain was modern, Ireland was backward; Britain was industrious, Ireland was lazy. Britain was made to rule; Ireland was made to be ruled.8
The Union was supposed to both cut off a pathway to a French invasion of Great Britain and to bring prosperity to Ireland. When it didn’t, Irish poverty became a chronic political problem for the United Kingdom. “Once at least in every generation,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “the question, ‘What is to be done with Ireland?’ rises again.” Between 1801 and 1845, Parliament convened many royal commissions and select committees, and sent many fact-finding missions to Ireland to answer this “Irish question.” These parliamentary reports are an enormous archive, rich and full of surprises. They are an important primary source for this book, but many in the nineteenth century were frustrated that all the government seemed to be able to do to mitigate Irish poverty was strike a committee and publish its evidence. “The Government seems to feel it must issue a Commission,” one pamphleteer complained.9
Ireland’s relationship to Britain—a restless partner in an unequal union; a frontier of empire, subject to military rule at the pleasure of Parliament; a poor and mostly agrarian hinterland of the world’s industrial centre—preoccupied the UK government throughout the nineteenth century. The political economist and public servant Nassau William Senior wrote in 1843, “When Irish questions, or rather the Irish Question (for there is but one), has been forced on our attention, we have felt, like a dreamer in a nightmare, oppressed by the consciousness that some great evil was rapidly advancing.” In 1844, Benjamin Disraeli complained in the House of Commons that the “Irish question” was quicksilver. One critic might say “it was a physical question; another, a spiritual. Now, it was the absence of the aristocracy; then the absence of railroads. It was the Pope one day; potatoes the next.”10
This book is also a history of these other Irish questions. Long before Irish potatoes rotted, many Britons were certain that something was rotten in Ireland. Although many Irish observers agreed, as the movement to repeal the Acts of Union gained ground in the years before the blight, some rejected British criticism on principle. Punch even satirised this contrarianism in a “report” from “Ballymuckandfilth,” an encomium to obvious rural poverty (after noting the piles of human and animal waste near Irish cottages: “How very different are the dung-heaps in Ireland! They positively steam with sweetest odours”). Irish poverty was bleak and unsustainable, and all the more so within the context of the United Kingdom, the era’s most sophisticated and powerful economy. What was incorrect was the usual British explanation of the cause of the rot. Successive governments, officials, and reformers concluded that Ireland was poor not because it was overexposed to the modern British market, but rather that Ireland was not yet modern enough. Many concluded that Ireland, and especially the Irish poor, seemed trapped in the past. To improve Ireland, the world of the Irish poor needed to be renovated and disinfected through the discipline and values of capitalism. Ireland, many Britons agreed, needed civilisation.11
In the rhetoric of British imperialism and colonialism, civilisation was a powerful but inchoate concept that was often a synonym for idealised British institutions and habits, especially in economic life. Civilised people earned wages and kept working even after they had earned enough for subsistence. They embraced markets. They were alert to the risks of unemployment and planned for the future. They bought things to meet their needs and wants, and then found new needs and wants to continue the cycle. As the commissioners who revised the English Poor Laws in the 1830s argued, paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham, poverty was “the state of one who, in order to obtain a mere subsistence, is forced to have recourse to labour.” A civilised person did not need to be forced to work, and anyone in a civilised society who did not work steadily was likely an invalid or a deviant. To be civilised meant to live within the social order made by British capitalism, to survive its challenges, and to embrace its virtues.12
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the new discipline of economics—“political economy”—enjoyed exceptional prestige and even glamour in British political circles. The deep conviction of many British imperial officials in crude conceptions of human motivation in response to market forces seemed at the time to have a solid foundation. It is difficult from the present to fully grasp the subversive appeal of markets in the first half of the nineteenth century: free markets seemed modern and modernising, a clean break from absolute monarchy and feudalism. Through the eighteenth century, British power and wealth expanded dramatically as the British Empire came to dominate the northern Atlantic and to expand in Asia, Oceania, and the Indian subcontinent. During the same era, Enlightenment, a cosmopolitan flowering of scientific, ethnographic, and philosophical research, transformed how Europeans saw themselves and Europe’s relationship to the rest of the world. Scientists discovered regular and predictable rules and systems in the physical world and the human body.13
By the 1840s, for many influential Britons, faith in the market had become so profound as to be nearly invisible—an atmosphere to breathe, not a belief to examine. This deep confidence reflected how “the purpose of political dominion” for the British Empire transformed during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Colonies that had been principally considered as sources of tribute became instead sources of raw materials for British factories and new markets for British goods. The beginning of the crisis in Ireland coincided with the decision, taken in late autumn 1845 by the prime minister, Robert Peel, to open a free trade in grain to the United Kingdom. Although some in Parliament were skeptical, many liberal officials and merchants were ecstatic—“the millennium had arrived,” a critic scoffed.14
In this context, the idea that markets also had discoverable, inalterable rules that could be used to predict and refine the progress of society seemed self-evident. What if there were laws of economic life as fixed as the laws of gravity described by Sir Isaac Newton? Political economists posited that the market was as miraculously self-organising as the natural world. Political economy, an Irish nobleman wrote, was “the only safe guide.” It was as certain, he believed, as “the Newtonian Philosophy,” and rejected, like physics, only by “the profoundly ignorant.” Early Victorian ideas of natural law and divine Providence added moral authority to these economic principles. The laws of physics seemed to prove the existence of a lawmaker. As Edmund Burke wrote, the God-fearing ought to recognise that God would not look kindly on “breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and, consequently the laws of God.” If the free market had natural laws, markets were also a part of the divine clockwork. Britain’s empire, in 1845, was a prosperous, dominant, and dominating empire of commerce and free labour, of colonies of settlement founded by independent emigrants and commercial colonies founded by swashbuckling entrepreneurs. Couldn’t British power be explained, at least in part, by the empire’s affinity with what seemed like natural laws?15
By the 1830s, theorists like Nassau William Senior (also a caustic critic of the Irish) were refining their definitions of poverty, emphasising work ethic as the primary determinant of prosperity. Poverty, they argued, was the condition of the unemployed, idle, and “indolent,” a favourite pejorative. The true poor of the United Kingdom were the “paupers” who depended on either the government or charity for subsistence. The “working class,” on the other hand, embraced risk, earned wages in the market, and prospered. The Irish seemed like natural paupers. “Belief and trust in luck,” the reformer and folklorist Mary Leadbeater wrote, “never quits the Irish.” The idea that the future was a matter of fortune rather than a product of effort, she maintained, eroded the Irish work ethic. The Irish were far from uniquely interested in luck—eighteenth-century Britons were mad for gambling on cards and horses, and Great Britain pioneered both the stock market and the state lottery. Reformers, however, saw the fatalism of many Irish tenants caught in the rent economy as evidence of a superstitious lack of civilisation, an obliviousness to the “real” power of markets to improve.16
Markets were idealised by political economists. The abstract market was rational, a place where buyers and sellers found equilibrium, in the form of a sale price, between desire and inventory. The abstract market was populated by autonomous and civilised individuals who responded in predictable ways to stimuli. Within this framework, governing a civilised society was a matter of creating the right incentives and stepping back to allow natural law to do its work. The abstract market left everyone happier. But markets were also real places, peopled and messy, shaped by deep asymmetries of power, wealth, and information and entangled in webs of debt and custom. The relative wealth and power of people entering the market always mattered, although by a formidable and deeply consequential sleight of hand, modern capitalism championed the illusion that markets were equal, as well as morally and economically uplifting.17
To political economists, the potato complicated the question of Ireland’s relative civilisation—and of its poverty. Ireland seemed to be in a kind of civilisational twilight zone, between the noxious darkness of the precapitalist past and the disinfecting light of the industrial future. On the one hand, the potato made it possible for Ireland to produce exports and rent for the British market without much capital. On the other hand, the security potatoes afforded seemed to have made millions of Irish workers into paupers, unwilling to work steadily for wages. Ironically, some political economists argued that since the Irish might never be at risk of starvation while potatoes flourished, the crop would have to be uprooted to fully civilise Ireland. Potatoes seemed to insulate the Irish from the bracing risks of an open market.
Moreover, civilised people ate bread. Because it required sowing, reaping, threshing, grinding, and baking, and since many people did not grow their own wheat or bake their own loaves, bread demanded steady work and a complex division of labour. Bread, it followed to political economists, was civilised as well as civilising. Potatoes, however, came out of the ground virtually ready to eat. Charles Trevelyan, a senior bureaucrat at the Treasury who oversaw famine-relief programs, wrote that the potato was “the deep and inveterate root of social evil.” Irish workers needed to be motivated to work and save, and to give up the security of potatoes for the greater risks and rewards of an economy based only on wages. If each individual worker strived for their own betterment, the collective effort would reform all of Irish society.18
The potato became a symbol of Irish backwardness. This idea, that Ireland and its potato-eaters were trapped in the past and needed to be brought by the Union into the modern world, made it impossible for officials to see essential features of the Irish economy. Britons imagined Ireland as a place that existed outside of, or prior to, the world of imperial capitalism. The opposite was true. Within the Union, Ireland was poorer than Britain, and many blamed this inequality on Irish backwardness and the earthy insulation of the potato diet. The idea that the market was always the best mechanism for addressing social problems made it impossible to imagine a solution to Irish poverty that was anything other than more of the same: a series of gestures to support and honour the “savage god” of the British Empire, “the Invisible Hand.”19
In reality, the Irish poor needed relief from the market, not relief through the market. The structures of land ownership and labour built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and an export economy and system of rent collection accelerated by the Union, weighed heavily on the Irish countryside. In Ireland, as in the rest of the United Kingdom, the population grew quickly in the early nineteenth century. The rental market for potato land became even more competitive. Even the poorest farmer made complex calculations on how to pay rent, whether in labour, potatoes, or cash, depending on the price of export crops and the relative availability of potatoes in local markets. However, even at the peak of the famine, British officials kept the faith—market competition was always considered better than direct aid from the government or other institutions. Laissez-faire economic policies were a lot of work. Government officials were anxious to create conditions within Irish rural society that would lead the Irish to behave “naturally,” as political economy predicted.20
The axioms of political economy also shaped how British officials perceived the Irish. The Irish, many Britons believed, exaggerated their poverty, making what was called in Ireland a “poor mouth,” “because they hope to get some of England’s bounty, and to escape paying their rent.” Grandiose, hyperbolic accounts of suffering, death, misfortune, and poverty are a feature of Irish literary culture; the modernist writer Flann O’Brien’s 1941 novella An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) is a parody of the genre. However, Britons construed these flourishes of Irish storytelling as an insidious plot to steal from the empire, lies told from “the extreme of impudence or the extreme of wretchedness.”21
The seeds of these assumptions about the capacities and motivations of Irish labourers in the 1840s had germinated in the eighteenth century, in the plantation colonies of the British Caribbean. When political economists imagined the least civilised possible labourer, they often imagined an enslaved worker. An enslaved worker had no reason to work without violent compulsion; a civilised wage worker in contrast welcomed having to work for wages to survive. “It is obvious that a man can be subjected to the hopelessness and the irresponsibility of a slave,” Nassau William Senior wrote, “without incurring the vices of slavery.” To justify mass enslavement, colonial officials argued that people of African descent were too uncivilised to work without coercion, and that coercion and enslavement, in a limited sense, could themselves be civilising forces.22
Consequently, what it meant to be “free” in the nineteenth-century British Empire was often indistinguishable from what it meant to be “civilised.” To be free, a British colonial subject would have to work for wages and participate in the market—and a civilised subject would accept that working for wages was both necessary and moral. The Irish were higher up this imaginary ladder of work ethic and civilisation than formerly enslaved people, but not by much. This view was shared by both passionate abolitionists and vulgar racists, albeit for very different reasons. Frederick Douglass, on a visit to a village near Dublin in 1846, described the cold, filthy housing occupied by so many of the Irish poor. Remembering open cesspits bubbling as human and animal waste decomposed, Douglass wrote that he would be ashamed “to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.” To Douglass, the Irish poor and the enslaved and free Black workers in the United States were united by a common struggle to survive in different, but pitiless, conditions. Thomas Carlyle, who advocated for the reimposition of slavery in the British Caribbean, wrote that Black labourers in that region “are emancipated, and it appears refuse to work: Irish Whites have long been entirely emancipated; and nobody asks them to work.” Carlyle feared that Britain had created in the Caribbean “a Black Ireland, ‘free’ indeed, but an Ireland, and Black.” To Carlyle, the whiteness of the Irish poor was a thin but indelible proof of superiority over Black people in the Caribbean. Otherwise, in Carlyle’s view, both required a firm hand—or a switch—to be made to labour usefully.23
From these principles, it followed in Ireland that austerity in poor relief—and, eventually, in famine relief—was both necessary and moral, and that generosity posed a moral hazard to the semicivilised Irish work ethic. Even in the deepest years of famine, many officials believed that anything given for free, without conditions—what was known as eleemosynary assistance—would threaten all wage labour in Ireland after the crisis passed. In the twenty-first century, the word “eleemosynary” is archaic. It was also archaic in the nineteenth century, only in currency among practitioners of the law of corporations, for whom it meant a lay (rather than a religious) corporation dedicated to “the perpetual distribution of the free alms, or bounty, of the founder of them to such persons as he has directed.” When reformers used it to discuss poor relief, the word was meant to evoke the antiquity and perhaps the sulphurous popery of giving charity without expecting labour in return. There was no eleemosynary famine relief in Ireland. In 1845 and 1846, Robert Peel’s government focused on intervening in the Irish grain market to keep prices steady. From the summer of 1846, John Russell’s government initially focused on regulating the Irish labour market by sponsoring public works before experimenting with nationally organised soup kitchens. The kitchens offered the closest thing to free relief in famine-era Ireland but were still expected to test the means of the hungry, to make sure that those seeking food had no other means of growing or buying it. Finally, the Russell ministry made Ireland’s workhouses, organised under the 1838 Irish Poor Law, responsible for famine relief.24
The laws of political economy could never fail; they could only be failed. As the famine continued, and one policy after another did little to resolve the disorder and desolation, many in the government became nihilistic, arguing that it would be better to do nothing to slow the famine or palliate the suffering of the Irish poor—to “let the evil work itself out like a consuming fire,” as a politician wrote in his diary. Charles Trevelyan considered the possibility that the blight was “some great intervention of Providence to bring back the potato to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as a principal article of national food.” For most British officials, the object of famine relief was to ride out the crisis, reduce dependence on potatoes among the Irish poor, and allow the influence of the market to restore balance to an otherwise sound economic system. The crisis, however, was the system.25
Historians have found in the Irish Great Famine morality plays and sagas of exile and national becoming. Some treat the famine as an opportunity to lay charges of genocide, or at least of genocidal intent, at the feet of British officials. Others search for villains and heroes—sifting gimlet-eyed administrators from fearless rebels. Still others emphasise the role of the famine for the origins of the Irish nation, or for the dispersion of the international Irish diaspora. These questions about the famine—of why it happened, of whom to blame, and of what meaning and purpose we can find in a catastrophe—were being asked even before the blight had receded.
Charles Trevelyan’s sleek official history of famine relief, The Irish Crisis, appeared in 1848, when the famine was far from over but after Lord Russell’s government had devolved responsibility for famine relief onto local authorities in Ireland. Trevelyan, a fine and forceful writer, blamed the famine on Ireland’s dependence on potatoes. The blight, he concluded, was a “sharp but effectual remedy,” a “direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.” Other early histories, written by survivors, emigrants, and exiles, argued that the blight invited the English to attempt to exterminate the Irish. Ireland, “an ancient Nation,” an exiled revolutionary wrote, was “stricken down by a war more ruthless and sanguinary than any seven years’ war, or thirty years’ war.” To many in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora, the famine was a proof of British cruelty. It is no accident that hunger strikes would become powerful symbolic weapons for future Irish revolutionaries. In the later nineteenth century, partly in reaction to a more confident and belligerent Irish nationalism, leading historians revised their analyses, downplaying the unique trauma of the crisis. More recent histories, especially economic histories, are more evenhanded, but the question of whom to blame for the famine continues to structure many historical debates.26
Among the most contentious questions for historians has been whether the United Kingdom, or the British Empire, can be blamed for the famine. Mass starvation, scholars of international law have argued, can be a tool of extermination, control, conquest, punishment, or exploitation. It might be satisfying retrospectively to arraign the British Empire on similar charges of “starvation crime.” And indeed, at least some prominent British officials, especially in the first year of potato blight, argued that the threat of famine would encourage mass emigration from Ireland, reducing pressure on land and dependence on potatoes. But in international law, starvation crime requires intent. A government or military committing the crime must act either to destroy the means of producing or obtaining food, or to forcibly displace people to cause starvation. Despite the morbid hopes of some political economists for a bracing food shortage to reform Ireland, the UK government—including its hundred Irish members of Parliament (MPs) and its many Anglo-Irish officials—did not intend Ireland to starve. There was no plan to destroy the potato crop, and successive Conservative and Whig governments spent millions of pounds on famine relief.27
Writing about rural County Donegal in the 1980s, an anthropologist noted that “death seems to enjoy an almost casual pre-eminence.” The Great Famine did not create these cultural preoccupations with death; if anything, the famine conditions were all the more horrific when wakes and funerals stopped as the living became too weak to mourn the dead. Accounts of the dead and dying in Ireland moved the British public to give to charity when the blight was at its most widespread and the famine at its most deadly, in the winter of 1846–1847. At the same time, emptying Ireland of people seemed like a crude but ultimately useful solution to Ireland’s poverty and “surplus population.”28
And so, blame matters. The suffering of so many people, subjects of what was certainly the most powerful country on earth at the time, calls out for moral judgement. Although the UK did not commit the crime of starvation in Ireland, it was not innocent. Rot is not a history of individual culpability for the Great Famine. The blight broke in a wave over structures in Ireland that were already in decay. No individual caused the Great Famine; no individual could have prevented it. However, Ireland relied on potatoes because of its position within the British Empire. The Irish poor suffered during the Great Famine as legacies of conquest and colonialism collided with a deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism as the only remedies for social problems, even amid catastrophic ecological and economic collapse.
Some histories of the Great Famine imagine alternative possibilities for Ireland in the 1840s—if only the right voices had been heard and the right policies implemented, mass death might have been prevented. Closing Irish ports, seizing and redistributing Irish crops, nationalising Irish land, and forcing or paying farmers to plant oats instead of potatoes for subsistence—these policies might have worked. However, these proposals—though we might yearn for them in retrospect—were so far beyond the political horizons of the United Kingdom in the 1840s as to be fantasies. Colonialism and capitalism made the British Empire; colonialism and capitalism made Irish poverty advantageous to Britain; colonialism and capitalism created conditions that turned blight into famine. Although structure does not excuse individual viciousness, the moral crimes that led to the Great Famine were committed over centuries. Ireland’s poverty and vulnerability, made by colonial dispossession and exploitation, shaped its relationship to Great Britain, its ostensible partner in the United Kingdom. Rotten potatoes, markets, poverty, and hunger give a tangible shape and meaning to British colonialism, its ambitions, limitations, structures, oversights, and catastrophes.
The scale of the Irish famine, and its central place in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland, can camouflage the reality that the Irish crisis was less singular than it seemed; it was the most destructive example of a European pandemic of potato disease, food shortages, and unrest. The United Kingdom was not swept up in the waves of revolutions in Europe that broke in the 1830s. However, Ireland was Britain’s “local volcano,” prone to explosion in times of general crisis. The potato failure of the 1840s accelerated and deepened an economic crisis across all of Europe from 1846 to 1848, as a downswing in the business cycle put industrial labourers out of work while poor harvests—not only of potatoes—drove up food prices. In 1848, the “Young Ireland” movement attempted to bring to Ireland the energy of the revolutions sweeping continental Europe. Like the potato failure, the revolutions of 1848 spread quickly across Europe, toppling governments in Hungary, Italy, France, Denmark, Poland, and elsewhere. The potato failure, like the revolutions, was a European crisis, “nationalized in retrospect.” Mass emigration was also not a uniquely Irish phenomenon, nor was Ireland the first primarily agricultural European country to send emigrants in large numbers overseas.29
Moreover, the Irish Great Famine was neither the first nor the last cataclysmic food shortage in the Victorian British Empire. Unstable climatic conditions caused by the El Niño oscillation in ocean temperatures in the southern Pacific caused droughts and famines in 1876–1879, 1889–1891, and 1896–1902 that killed tens of millions of people in British India. Crop failure was triggered by natural phenomena—drought, heavy rains, population explosions of pests—but famine in the empire followed crop failure when imperial administrators placed their faith in the market to solve food shortages. There was almost always enough food; the obstacle was a stubborn insistence that private merchants deliver food to the hungry, and that the hungry pay for it with money or labour. As in Ireland, the faith of the British Empire in the power of the market made it impossible to imagine alternative solutions to famine in India.30
If any factors set Britain apart from continental Europe in the era of the famine, they were the breadth of its empire and the depth of the faith of the British political class in free trade, free labour, and the power of capital. Ireland was a part of the British Empire, a conquered island that conquest had brought close, geographically, economically, and culturally, to the imperial centre. Consequently, the “Irish question” was a constant, and discomfiting, reminder of the limits of British power, “a critical abyss” that refused to obey the laws of civilisation and political economy that constituted and justified imperial power. Ireland proved the hollowness of a theory that was supposed to both structure the empire and give it moral purpose. Proximity to Britain and British capitalism was not civilising for the colonial empire—it was humiliating, and often immiserating. As John Pitt Kennedy wrote in 1835, “reckless indifference” to Ireland was profitable for the British ruling class, the “selfish English oligarchy, who found that every successive act of exasperation exercised against Ireland, added to their own wealth.”31
The blight epidemic was a subsistence crisis, but it was also an ecological crisis—not an “act of God” but an unintended consequence of the exploitation of Irish land and labour within a shrinking and accelerating world. In this, the famine was also disconcertingly modern. Although Ireland’s potato fields looked rustic, they were intensive monocrops, often of a single variety of potato, cloned and cloned again when farmers planted potato cuttings instead of seeds. Phytophthora infestans, geneticists believe, originated in the valleys, carved by ancient lava flows, outside Mexico City, where potatoes are a native species. Wild potatoes usually have the genetic diversity to resist P. infestans, and the drier climate is less conducive to the rapid spread of the mould. In Ireland, though, P. infestans found an agricultural ecosystem and climate that could not have been better designed for a population explosion of the microorganism. A landscape shaped by the demands of the British Empire met a pathogen brought to Europe by capitalism’s steamships and global trading networks.
The Great Famine is a troubling preamble to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century world where capitalism, for all its power to create and satisfy human desires, can find few answers to the threats to human life posed by introduced species, novel pathogens, and climate catastrophes. The arrival of an organism like the blight mould was a predictable biological accident made possible by the transformation of human beings’ relationship to the natural world. Many scientists consider the human era to be the Anthropocene, a new period distinct from the earlier Holocene. It has been an era of human-made changes to climate, land use, the nitrogen cycle, ocean acidity, and so much else. The evolving conditions of the Anthropocene—the surprises and disasters of a new chapter in the turbulent history of the planet—present new threats to food security. The global homogenisation of crops and agricultural techniques threatens the biodiversity and resilience of the many plants and animals that human beings have domesticated. Intensive monoculture made Irish potatoes vulnerable to blight. The solutions proposed to mitigate famine were themselves the product of a kind of intellectual and political monoculture. Solutions were unimaginable outside the market that fueled the crisis to begin with.32
There are many people on earth in a similar position to that of Irish labourers in 1845: growing staples for subsistence and producing agricultural commodities for global markets. In 2023, at least two billion people subsisted on food grown by smallholding farmers. And just as in Ireland in 1845, many present-day small and subsistence farmers are also wage workers or commodity producers. When there is no escape from the market, it eats the weakest first. The Irish who survived on potatoes were agricultural labourers estranged from their land, eating only a single introduced crop so that a small class of landlords and larger tenant farmers would have the freedom to flip their fields from oats to grazing land to meet favourable markets in Britain. The Irish way of life looked ancient—but it was heartbreakingly, almost quintessentially, modern.33
The famine seemed like an act of God or a natural disaster, but many of its features were man-made. Potato crops died by a natural process, but the brittle structures of the Irish economy were built by centuries of contact—conquest, resistance, exploitation, and, finally, unequal and ambiguous partnership—between Ireland, Britain, and the British Empire. The “laws” of political economy, in contrast, were considered to be natural. Likewise, during the Great Famine, while British laissez-faire policies proved to be anything but self-sustaining—ostensibly self-directed market forces needed to be fussed over and carefully calibrated—the actual Irish, who were actually starving, were left to their own devices and to “natural” market forces.
This book traces the history of the structures that made the Great Famine, and the history of the crabbed and market-bound efforts during the famine to feed the starving. I describe and analyse Ireland’s place in the British Empire and the Union, as well as the structures of the market for food and rent in Ireland and the astonishing centrality of the potato there, essential both to exploitation and to small pleasures of everyday life in Ireland’s countryside and cities. From the arrival of P. infestans in 1845, Rot follows the efforts of successive British governments to turn the principles of the market and its civilising power into schemes for providing food to the hungry without stepping on the toes of private traders or giving away too much without requiring something in return.
In 1845–1846, the Conservative government, led by Robert Peel, implemented plans to purchase maize, virtually unknown in Ireland, and introduce the grain into Irish markets wherever prices surged. In autumn 1846, however, the blight returned, obliterating an already historically small potato crop. In “Black ’47”—the winter of 1846–1847—Ireland collapsed into desolation, death, and panic. A new prime minister, John Russell, and his Whig government funded public works and eventually soup kitchens to try to bring a disastrous situation under control. Epidemic blight reappeared in Irish fields with varying severity every year until the early 1850s, as hundreds of thousands emigrated in panic. However, by summer 1847, Russell’s government—faced with a financial crisis and the failure of previous relief programs—declared that the famine was no longer a crisis for the United Kingdom as a whole. From late 1847, Ireland’s Poor Law unions administered famine relief, operating on the principle that “Irish property pay for Irish poverty.” In the face of failure after failure, both major British political parties rarely wavered from a commitment to the idea that with the right market incentives, the famine could end and Ireland could be civilised.
To British officials—and to many historians reading British records—the Great Famine appeared distorted, its shape and cause deformed by temporal and optical illusions. Irish farms looked primitive. The Irish poor, especially in the countryside, seemed to resist the modern rhythms of the market and empire, to cleave stubbornly to ancient, unchanged, and backward ideas, customs, and patterns of work. Ireland before the famine, however, more closely resembled capitalism’s future than its past. Irish labourers were paid some of the lowest wages in the British Empire, and they relied on the abundance of the potato to survive. The staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potatoes failed.