In London, on May 1, 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened to the public in Hyde Park. Modeled on France’s successful series of national industrial exhibitions, but bigger and grander, the exposition symbolised and celebrated the commercial and industrial power of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Before it closed in October, an estimated six million Londoners and tourists had visited the Crystal Palace, a glass and iron greenhouse three times the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral, purpose-built to hold thousands of displays and exhibitors’ booths from the United Kingdom, Britain’s colonies, and the world. The exhibition was a watershed. Forty years later, schoolchildren memorised its opening among the principal dates of Queen Victoria’s early reign.1
The central hall of the Crystal Palace was bright and wide, ringed by balconies supported by iron struts. The side galleries were filled with products from Britain’s allies, colonies, and dependencies: crockery, cutlery, fabrics, furniture, artwork, exotic fruits under bell jars, jewelry, metalwork, and precious stones, including the enormous Kohinoor diamond. The hall itself displayed heavy machines and monumental works of craftsmanship and industrial design: printing presses, locomotive engines, power looms, model ships, and full-size boats suspended by cables from the ceiling. Trees grew inside the structure, and a fountain, more than twenty feet tall, flowed with Schweppes Malvern Soda Water. The exhibition, according to the authors of one of many souvenir guides, taught a lesson in industriousness. This emporium of products, machines, commodities, art, and trinkets would inspire millions, especially among the working classes, to work harder, to refine their tastes, “to… rise in the scale of society.”2
While London celebrated the bounty of the empire at the Crystal Palace, Ireland still seemed to many in Britain to be, as a report in a medical journal commented, “the exception to almost every rule, in religion, in politics, and in social economics.” Although the famine in Ireland was ending, late blight remained an endemic threat to Irish potatoes, and to potato crops across the Americas and Europe. The heroic age of the European potato—its hardiness and yield first celebrated by Enlightenment agronomists and then feared by political economists following Thomas Malthus—was over. The Irish potato crop was never again as generous as in 1844. In 1859, the total area of land in Ireland planted with potatoes was 40 percent smaller than in 1846, and the average yield per acre had fallen by a third. The 1851 UK census also showed a shocking decline in Ireland’s population, from 8,175,124 to 6,515,794. The population that year was lower even than the population in 1821.3
During the famine years, James Fintan Lalor wrote, “life lost its form” in Ireland. But life goes on for the living, and by May 1851 Irish rural society was beginning to regain shape. Ireland remained poor. Starvation, disease, and chaotic emigration had reduced some of the pressure on Irish land, and poor relief had devolved onto the Poor Law unions. The blunt logic of political economy would either relieve the Irish poor or uproot them and send them across the oceans. Those who remained in Ireland and who survived the famine years with their money in a savings bank had a chance to climb the social ladder. Some Irish emigrants remembered Ireland with nostalgia, others never mentioned it at all, and still others digested their exile into cold loathing of Britain.4
Collective trauma galvanised survivors on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1858, exiles in North America formed the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood, cousin to the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland. American Fenians conducted raids into Canada and coordinated with cells in Ireland, England, and Australia in the hopes of overthrowing British rule in Ireland. In the late 1870s, advocates for the rights of Irish tenants provoked an organised “Land War” of rent strikes and skirmishes with police. Bills for Home Rule—for a devolved Irish Parliament within the United Kingdom—were defeated in Parliament in 1886 and 1893. The Catholic church became more politically active, more closely associated with Irish nationalism, and more committed to suppressing folk Catholicism among the rural poor in favour of established church dogma and hierarchy. Far from offering a providential answer or resolution to the “Irish question,” the blight made Irish issues even more intractable for the Union and the empire. The 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent war of independence had their own proximate causes—conflicts between republican and constitutionalist nationalists, the repeated failure of Home Rule, the tumult of the First World War—but the Great Famine was in the background, a wound that gave shape to an idea of the nation.5
The famine, and the steady wave of emigration it inaugurated, also made “Irishness” into a creation as much about diaspora as of Ireland itself. Although Irishness was still associated with a flair for talking, bullshitting, self-pity, and melodrama, the swaggering Irish cop, the corrupt Irish ward-heeling politician, and above all the Irish drunk replaced colonial caricatures of superstitious, lazy, and half-civilised Irish farmers in motley, filthy evening wear. The Irish drunk (you know the jokes: “What do you call an Irish seven-course meal? A potato and a six-pack,” etc.) was a transnational creation—a combination of condemnations of alcohol from a temperance movement that was also very powerful in Ireland, and resentments directed at the millions of Irish immigrants crowding into already-bursting cities. Before the Great Famine, drinking culture in the United Kingdom was relatively homogeneous, and temperance activists made the same arguments to the British working classes as to the Irish poor—that drink was a waste of scarce resources, that it loosened morals. What started as sharp xenophobia directed at immigrants eroded into familiar, winking stereotypes that the Irish diaspora adopted as part of an otherwise diffuse identity.6
The scale and pace of emigration that began with the Great Famine made permanent changes to the texture and meaning of Irishness. The organism that caused the blight, in turn, permanently transformed Irish agriculture. P. infestans remains endemic in Ireland. Met Éireann, the Irish national weather service, makes regular blight forecasts based on temperature, relative humidity, and estimates of sporulation periods for the blight oomycete. Worldwide, the pathogen remains a multibillion-dollar problem. The arrival of the blight in Europe was only one of uncounted accidental introductions of new species associated with the massively expanded scale and speed of international commerce—of unpredictable and unanticipated encounters between ecologies otherwise separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometres. The world is smaller now than in 1845. Animals, plants, and microorganisms defy borders and quarantines. Climate is even less predictable. Human beings depend for food on a homogenised agricultural biota, radically simplified and dependent on chemical pesticides, antibiotics, and sophisticated technology.
The Irish Great Famine was also only one of the first of several devastating famines to afflict the British Empire in the Victorian era. Indeed, India, not Ireland, was the epicentre of colonial famine in the nineteenth-century empire. Victoria’s long reign, from 1837 to 1901—an era whose plenty, glamour, ambition, and technical and scientific achievements the Great Exhibition celebrated so effectively—began and ended with mass death from starvation in the subcontinent. The Agra famine of 1837–1838, which began with drought in the territories of the East India Company, killed an estimated 800,000 people. In 1899–1900, during the British Raj, a widespread famine in western and central India killed anywhere from 1 million to more than 4 million people, depending on the estimate. In 1865–1866, at least 1.3 million people died during a famine in Orissa, and in 1876–1878 and 1896–1902, anywhere from 12.2 million to 29.3 million people died in south and southwestern India during prolonged famines that were caused by drought and exacerbated by the demand for cotton in British and world markets.7
Laissez-faire remained a principle of British economic policy in India; Adam Smith’s arguments against regulating the price of grain were taught at Haileybury, the East India Company’s college. As in Ireland when the potatoes failed, British officials in India “convinced themselves that overly heroic exertions” against the natural laws of the economy “were worse than no effort at all.” Free trade in grain pushed Indian farmers away from subsistence agriculture, and India’s extensive railway network encouraged and accelerated speculation: as grain crops failed, crops that survived were whisked away for export. Also as in Ireland, the pressures of changing land use and labour in order to supply the British market with exports created conditions that turned an “act of God”—the cyclical El Niño warming of the sea surface’s temperature in the southern Pacific, which affects monsoon rain patterns in India—into an unimaginably destructive and deadly famine.8
The great Indian famines, however, clarified the meaning of successful management of food security in Britain’s colonial empire. Sir Richard Temple had overseen famine relief efforts during a shorter famine in Bengal and Bihar in 1873–1874 by arranging imports of rice and approving a massive public works campaign, measures that combined to dramatically reduce excess deaths. He was scolded for spending beyond what the Treasury had approved and for fostering dependence among Indian peasants, a reminder that the “task of saving life, irrespective of the cost, is… beyond our power to undertake.” Temple saved his imperial career in the famine of 1876–1878 by organising austere relief works that had strict labour tests and wages set at “bare subsistence.” As in Ireland, it was paramount in India that “private trade in grain should not be interfered with.” “Wheat,” a historian concludes, “was capital.”9
At the Great Exhibition, there was no commemoration of the Great Famine. The exhibition was a giddy advertisement for empire and global trade, not a sober reckoning of its costs. In the Crystal Palace, Irish exhibitors presented their wares as a part of the United Kingdom’s delegation, organised by industry. The turn-of-the-century dream of British capital industrialising Ireland within the United Kingdom reappeared, unscathed, in the galleries. Potatoes on display were touted for what they could become through industrial processes: farina to supplement flour for factory workers, or starches for manufacturing. Irish industrialists promoting new ways to collect and process peat set up booths alongside English and Scottish collieries and industrial chemists; an illustrated souvenir guide mentioned that the turf sellers had “attracted the attention of English capitalists.” Ireland’s industries, battered by British competition, were also on display. There were Irish flagstones and slate, ore and precious metals; wool, flax, and finished linen. In a very rare mention of the famine, the official guide to the exposition noted that one manufacturer had hired unemployed women and girls to make lace after the potatoes failed.10
The Ordnance Survey, alongside wall hangings of other impressively large and detailed maps of Britain, displayed a map of Dublin, available for sale as a booklet of thirty-three sheets. There was also a papier-mâché model of the townlands of Kilkenny to admire, painted with topographic lines. The Irish maps were a spectacle for working-class visitors and an advertisement to the monied that Irish land was no longer a mess of rundale and townland, debt and family obligation—in short, that the knot of encumbrances had been picked. A souvenir guide praised the Irish maps as invaluable for future railway and canal projects and “as a basis for the valuation and registry of property and for social improvements of many kinds.” The Ireland of the Great Exhibition was not mired in colonial legacies, caught in a gyre of increasing inequality, or battered and traumatised by one of the worst humanitarian disasters to strike western Europe in the nineteenth century. At the exhibition, Ireland was a partner in an uncomplicated and unambiguous Union, and open for business.11
There were some three hundred Irish exhibits at the exposition, almost all displaying manufacturing tools, sample materials, or artworks; but even subsumed into the collection, as one historian writes, Ireland was both “assimilated and distanced.” The kinds of manufacturers who catered to the Irish middle class and gentry, in Ireland and Britain both, sold a romantic version of the Irish past, a Celtic Revival. The jewelers George and Samuel Waterhouse, of Dublin, displayed the outstanding Tara Brooch, a masterpiece from the late seventh or early eighth century that had been discovered on a beach near Drogheda in 1850 (and is now a highlight of the collections of the National Museum of Ireland). G. and S. Waterhouse sold replicas of the brooch and many other pieces in a similar Celtic style, some of which were selected by the Royal Commissioners of the Exhibition for inclusion in the founding collection of the museum that became the Victoria and Albert, in South Kensington, London. High-end Irish cabinetmakers showed off furniture crafted from the wood of oaks and yews recovered, preserved, from Irish bogs. The pieces were machine-tooled and then hand-engraved, many with Celtic iconography and scenes from Irish mythical history, especially the tales of the High Kings who ruled Ireland before the birth of Christ. Arthur Jones, of Dublin, displayed a “music temple,” a decorative piece carved from bog yew and engraved with images of Ollamh Fodhla, a legendary lawgiver, presenting a copy of the preconquest Brehon laws to Ireland, the centre of a “chronological series commencing 700 years BC, the date of the foundation of the Irish monarchy… ending with the present agricultural age of Ireland, the memorable year 1851.”12
For wealthy Irish and British consumers, exquisite Celtic jewelry and fine furniture made of bog woods reconciled the romantic past with the industrial and imperial present. The Irish poor, considered by so many political economists and imperial officials to be outside modernity and in need of the civilising power of the market and cash wages, disappeared from view. A legendary king could evoke a romantic idea of Ireland distant and abstract enough to be absorbed into British rule. The Ireland of the remote past was a fallen civilisation that could be rediscovered and remembered by imperial collectors and curators. In time, the empire might know the Irish better than they knew themselves—another reason to accept British power in the Victorian present.
The famine was a crisis of ideas as well as policy—not a crisis of a lack of ideas, but of the implementation of an orthodoxy of ill-considered ideas, proven unfit for purpose in practice. In the years that followed, political economists began to revise their theories, adding nuance and exceptions to purportedly natural laws. John Stuart Mill argued that nothing could check the growth of the Irish population until Ireland’s economy modernised. Britain’s growing industrial cities, Mill argued, were in effect sopping up the overflow of dispossessed and deracinated agricultural workers. If the British economy shrank, or even stalled, Mill wrote, “there is no certainty that this fate may not be reserved for us.” Compassion for British and Irish farmworkers was laudable, but Mill suggested what was really needed was “some application of common sense.” One did not need to adopt the cruelty of many Malthusians, he argued, to recognise that Malthus was right that higher wages might affect the birth rate. Civilisation required restraint on population growth. “Want, in that age of the world,” Mill concluded, “had its uses, as even slavery had.” But in the civilised, emancipated world of free trade and free labour, poverty did not “make men either better workmen or more civilized beings.” Nassau William Senior, however, was unpersuaded. The Irish “still depend mainly on the potato,” he wrote in the 1860s. “They still depend rather on the occupation of land, than on the wages of labour. They still erect for themselves the hovels in which they dwell. They are still eager to subdivide and to sublet. They are still the tools of their priests, and the priests are still ignorant of the economical laws on which the welfare of the labouring classes depends.”13
Anthropologists have used the term “structural violence” to describe how the choices impoverished people make can be crabbed by economic and political systems that are far beyond their control. In Ireland during the famine, the hazards of famine magnified and sharpened violent structures of rent, exploitation, and potato dependence. Some of the Irish poor risked their lives for others in the face of starvation, and others stole food, or betrayed friends, or abandoned family. Structure constrains the powerful as well as the weak, albeit at a different scale. Across the British Empire, some officials were cruel or nihilistic, vengeful or callous. But the violence of empire was carried out as much by a system as by individuals. There are wicked relief officers, landlords, and administrators in the records of the Irish famine. However, many of the people charged with the design and administration of famine relief were competent, intelligent, and moved by the suffering they saw. Still, even the most humane imperial official was limited by the economic and political realities of an era of colonialism and imperial power, and by the prevailing stereotypes, assumptions, and values that animated the empire. British imperial culture was suspicious and contemptuous of the poor everywhere, of the Irish in general, and of the Irish poor in particular. In the face of starvation, at least some relief officials—not usually rich men, but half-pay officers and assorted functionaries—risked their jobs to feed the hungry and risked their lives to treat the sick. As a leading legal historian of the British Empire writes, “Humanity and inhumanity are real dispositions.” However, “even the sincerest convictions and most authentic emotional responses may be… subdued, or even at times reversed, by the patterns of power.”14
History is not a parable. The history of Ireland within the British Empire, and the history of the empire itself is not a “usable past” of heroes to emulate and villains to despise. It is the history of the structures and constraints within which labourers, politicians, administrators, and priests made decisions. The new states of Great Britain, in 1707, and the United Kingdom, in 1801, were forged in an era of imperial conquest, colonial mass enslavement, commercial expansion, and military adventuring. British power was justified, however, on the basis of civilisation—on the idea that all the destruction was ultimately in the service of human flourishing, which could be measured through participation in British markets and institutions. The structures that built and justified British imperial power in Ireland meant that, in 1845, the leaders of the United Kingdom could find no other way to explain the worst subsistence crisis in the new country’s short history than a definitive lack of civilisation among the Irish. The empire could conceive of no other useful tools to meet the crisis than the principles of the free market and the workhouse.
Years of famine did little to undermine the assumptions about empire, poverty, and civilisation in Ireland that shaped both British attitudes toward the Irish and the design of relief policies. In 1849, James Hewitt, the 4th Viscount Lifford, an Anglo-Irish landlord, former high sheriff of Donegal, and future Conservative peer, acutely understood the immiserating cycle of rent that forced Irish workers to take “land at an exorbitant rent” while families “lived upon the potatoes [they] produced and laboured either in England or Ireland for part of the rent” and “begged for the rest.” The potato blight had forced the issue. Hewitt complained that so long as government propped up the Poor Law unions, “things will never be better. It will be as if there were an inexhaustible supply of potatoes, the rents will not be lowered, the poor will not become more industrious… [and] land will not be made more productive.” This was no insult to the Irish, he concluded: “we are none of us industrious except some stimulus is supplied.”15
But who was “we”? An Anglo-Irish landlord—even a good one—was not the same as a landless labourer. At the same time, neither was an Anglo-Irish landlord always the same as a British aristocrat. Imperial power was thickly layered. More important, though, Hewitt could not see his own place in the structure of power in Ireland. The forces of the economy seemed permanent, more a feature of the natural world rather than a historically specific and man-made set of relationships. The idea that markets—and not just human exchange in general, but markets on the model described, analysed, and championed by political economists and politicians in Britain—represented the natural unfolding or efflorescence of civilisation was an idea with a specific history. But in the British Empire, the history of the market was easy to erase and to replace with an idea of markets as a universal and irresistible civilising force.
The Great Exhibition—a fantasia of products, luxuries, machines, and conveniences—represented the capacity of capitalism and modernity to improve the world. The Great Famine that John Russell likened in January 1847 to a “famine of the thirteenth century” was as modern as the machinery on display in Hyde Park. Ireland was pressed into an imperial and national economic order centred on booming London; Irish farmers raised potatoes to keep up with the demands of rent and land imposed by an accelerating market; the blight arrived in a steamship after Belgian farmers ordered new potato cultivars from the Americas; the Irish starved because the idea of the free market and the industrious and individual worker was so deeply entrenched in British politics and political economy as to be effectively inviolable, even in the deepest crisis.
Between 2000 and 2011, according to experts, although many places experienced shortages and subsistence crises, there were no famines. By 2017, however, parts of eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen were either already experiencing famine or on the edge of famine. Now, as I write in April 2024, analysts working for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme warn that there are eighteen “hotspots” in twenty-two countries where people are currently enduring famine conditions or are at high risk of falling into famine. The imagery of famine can still deceive us as it deceived John Russell—skeletal limbs and swollen bellies can seem like elements of a barbaric past thrust into the civilised present. But famine in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, is a disease of modernity—of war, of ecological accident, of climate change, of the vicissitudes of markets acting on the vulnerable.16
The idea that poor relief should cost the people who receive it something—labour or an acceptance of surveillance or a performance of gratitude to taxpayers—is still a principle of many modern welfare states, including the United Kingdom. In January 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced plans to cut taxes and benefits, declaring that his approach to social welfare depended on “making sure that everybody who can work does work.” The notion that austerity promotes industriousness, and that the moral and economic rewards of industriousness are worth the moral and material costs of petty austerity remains an article of faith for many governments. These are the same principles as the ones that animated famine relief in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. They are even more galling in 2024, when governments have resources and technical and bureaucratic expertise far greater than the United Kingdom did in 1845.17
And so, the Great Famine rehearsed in Ireland many of the most destructive consequences of capitalist modernity: colonialism, exploitation, ecological disaster, sudden and panicked mass emigration, heedless destruction and exploitation giving way to expulsion—all in the name of purifying market forces. In its own time, the Great Famine showed the potential destructive power of the vigorous industrial capitalism of the Victorian United Kingdom and the British Empire. The colonial land settlement in Ireland had placed the Irish poor at a profound disadvantage within the empire’s markets. After the Union, Britain’s growing need for imported food increased pressure on the Irish poor and further entrenched the potato as the only anchor in a furious gale. Throughout the famine, neither Tory nor Whig governments abandoned the principle that the rigour of the market was the only way to uproot the potato and civilise Ireland—to teach the Irish, finally, the value of industry.
The Great Famine, although an event of world-historical importance, was not a singular event in world history. It wasn’t even a singular event in the history of Ireland: recall that the famine of 1740–1741 killed more people by proportion of population. Other subsistence crises, wars, and ecological catastrophes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would also send waves of people around the world, people fleeing violence, starvation, drought, or economic collapse. But the Great Famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland and the history of the United Kingdom. It proved the hollowness of the Union, and proved that Ireland was still, in the eyes of most people making decisions, a half-civilised colony. The Great Famine also gave the British Empire a blueprint for digesting the ecological and human consequences of a burdensome and often destructive global system of agriculture and trade that benefited Britain at the expense of the empire. When the system functioned, it was civilisation. When it broke down, it was Providence.