Rot : An Imperial History of the Irish Famine

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.

Padraic X. Scanlan is an associate professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Inquiry. The author of two previous books, he lives in Toronto.