Rot: An Imperial History Of The Irish Famine, Scanlan - B +

        "In 1844 or 1845, Phtophthora Infestans crossed the Atlantic." The fungus-like mold destroyed potatoes throughout Europe. In Ireland, at least a million died and a million and a half fled. "Ireland's population would continue to decline for nearly a hundred years."

        The British considered the Irish "listless, apathetic, and backward." They were inferior peoples. "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 after the 1801 Act of Union, Ireland was no more than "an impoverished exploited agricultural district" akin to what Sicily was to the Romans. "On the eve of the famine, Ireland annually exported roughly 250,000 cattle, 90 million eggs, and enough grain to feed 2 million people in Britain." British policy makers confidently diagnosed that the inherent indolence of the Irish poor was the cause of their poverty, and "prescribed a greater exposure to market risks to treat the symptoms." The unwelcome blight struck in August, 1845 throughout Europe. But, nowhere else did it lead to famine and widespread death. PM Robert Peel's program to help the Irish was to support free trade allowing American corn to be imported to assist the poor, "and reform economic Irish life." Many of Britain's elites were "willing to find comfort in the possibility that mass death might cure Ireland's economic and political life." Relief Committees were established, managed by the Protestant Ascendancy, and with the goal of not giving away, but selling the corn to the Irish.  Because the crop failure the first summer was "incomplete and uneven" the death rate was not nearly as it would be in the ensuing two years. 

        The crop in 1846 was worse and "the winter of 1846-1847 saw rural Ireland become a hellscape, shocking and incomprehensible." Four hundred thousand died. "What 1847 shows is the poverty of early Victorian political imagination that could only see a solution to famine that depended on market principles and the disciplinary power of supply and demand." Help needed to be "parsimonious" to prevent the poor from becoming dependent on the government. Throughout Ireland, men, women, and children were dying by the thousands, their bodies left to rot to be eaten by rats or wild dogs. Disease, particularly typhus, compounded the problem. As news of the horror spread, nations around the world sent food and money in unprecedented amounts. The spring of 1847 saw a significant number of soup kitchens established, and they reduced the starvation deaths. After that summer, the famine became more localized and the death and deprivation continued in the poorer areas. London decided that the Irish famine was Ireland's problem and discontinued assistance from the central government.

         "With the return of the blight and the withdrawal of most government and charitable support for relief, mortality spiked in the poorest counties." As the famine began to wind down, the powers that be decided there were too many people trying to farm in a world where the landlords, with no discernible revenue for years, were losing farms to foreclosure. Eviction and emigration skyrocketed. In 1845, 93,000 left; seven years later the number was 400,000. Over the next six decades, six million more departed. "The Great Famine was a wound that gave shape to an idea of a nation."

          I read 'The Great Hunger' in the late 1960's. It was the first I learned about this topic and I came away with a youngster's shock at the horrors experienced by my ancestors. My great-grandfather, David Barry, was born during the famine in County Cork and came to NYC in the early 1850's. A while back, I read a few books that looked at this topic tangentially, and I was shocked to begin to understand the indifference of the British government. This history takes that shock to another level. It wasn't just the insistence on requiring market solutions, but the whole structure of Ireland's economy. It was a complete and total colonial exploitation, led by the Protestant Ascendancy,  that used Ireland's soil and people to produce the greatest amount of food for London at the lowest possible return for the landlords.  For the poor tenants, there were only enough potatoes to thrive - until there weren't. The Irish-American immigrant experience is a distant memory from the 19th century. The Irish hated the British, and I would agree that they had good cause. I vaguely remember my great-grand mother, born in Ballyshannon in 1864, and who, I was told, cheered the bombing of London in the two world wars.  A people stripped of their land, their religion and their language, did pretty well in the long run, particularly in the US.