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Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
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About This Book
A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland's most infamous disaster In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight's devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland's place in the United Kingdom and 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. The empire's laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland's wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire's embrace of modern capitalism. 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.
Reviews
"There is much that is familiar in Rot, but everywhere Scanlan looks at the familiar in new and interesting ways."
"Shelve this fine history next to Tim Pat Coogan's The Famine Plot."
"Seeks to offer a more dialectical and complex story of human errors ..."
"It pries the famine's history away from crude and reductionist political interpretations to ask questions about our own era, in which precariously employed laborers produce export crops so finely tuned genetically as to be susceptible to their own version of blight ..."
"The book is richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship, and it does not fall into the trap of oversimplifying the famine as deliberate genocide."
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