The Gorta Mór

Queen Victoria knew what to blame for the potato famine that killed a million people in Ireland: “The heedless & improvident way in which the poor Irish have long lived.” Republican nationalists, by contrast, called her the Famine Queen and alleged that her heartless regime had shipped food from the island while people starved. Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine wisely avoids this old blame game. Scanlan, who teaches at the University of Toronto, notes that the potato blight that first struck in 1845 was a European event, which also killed hundreds of thousands from Belgium to Prussia. The question is why a borderless natural disaster became a famine in Ireland. What distinctive “structures” made its impact so prolonged and deadly there? In answering that question, Scanlan has given us a uniquely grim and illuminating account of Anglo-Irish relations.

Scanlan’s Ireland was not quite a colony. He is skeptical of the folk idea that the Irish suffered because the British treated them as uppity natives. Early on, Scanlan writes not of the potato fields but of Irish officers carousing in the Crown colony of Ceylon, underscoring how many Irish were expanding Victoria’s realms when the famine struck. “The British Islands,” as the architects of the United Kingdom had boasted, “constitute one Empire.” In the decades after the 1800 Acts of Union, Ireland was economically and politically integrated with Britain: there was one parliament and one church, as well as a single currency and a free market. Roman Catholics had been emancipated from the elaborate legal bindings that had made them second-class citizens.

Yet these changes had not lifted the dead weight of past injustice; they actually deepened the economic asymmetry with Britain. The Tudor conquest of Ireland, its invasion by Oliver Cromwell in 1649, and the penal laws that made it impossible for Catholics to inherit property had pushed most of the population into landlessness. By the time of Victoria’s reign, just under 4,000 people, most of them Protestant, owned 80 percent of Irish land. In a mainly agricultural society, everyone else had to rent fields from others or else labour for them, leaving most Irish dependent on revenues from the export of food to Britain. Even prosperous dairy farmers rarely tasted the butter that they churned, because they had to sell all of it to pay their rent. And rent tended to rise in step with population growth, even as commodity prices fluctuated.

The cultivation of potatoes had taken off in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because the tubers, originally from the Americas, could feed an immiserated people. Potatoes were filling and made for a fairly complete if monotonous diet when eaten with the buttermilk left over from the dairy trade plus “kitchen”: whatever foraged fixings people could find, from herring to seaweed. Landless labourers could grow potatoes of their own by “taking conacre,” working tiny plots on short-term leases. Roughly 75 percent of the food that they ate came from such patches. Potato peelings fattened the hogs that labourers sold to pay rent, taxes, and other expenses. These living piggy banks illustrate how relentlessly the Irish worked for Britain: before the famine struck (and ruined the swine trade overnight), a people who infrequently tasted meat were selling about half a million of the animals (especially the fatty Berkshire pig) a year.

The British mocked the Irish as archaic “potatophagi”— a race addicted to an easy food that allowed them to marry young and have too many children without thought of the future. Such victim blaming distorted responses to the blight, a pathogen that reduced potatoes to inedible mush and was particularly deadly because it destroyed crops in storage pits as well as in the ground. But Scanlan acquits the British state on charges of “starvation crime,” in part because its officials borrowed and spent heavily to get food into Ireland. As prime minister, Robert Peel imported 44 million pounds of American maize when the potato first failed, thinking it could feed nearly half a million people for three months. (The Irish struggled to cook “Peel’s brimstone,” a claggy foodstuff with which they were unfamiliar.) Civil society joined in, as well. The Queen, for example, championed the British Association, “a clearinghouse for publicity and donations.” Among those who supported its operations were enslaved people in Alabama and the Choctaw Nation. Yet such efforts were never sustained or extensive enough to reach those at the margins of society, especially when the blight reappeared in subsequent years. Scanlan coolly records their desperate shifts to survive and their agonizing deaths.

Fiscal constraints limited further action by the central state: the City worried that the loans it contracted to buy American food were draining Britain’s gold. So did political orthodoxies. Officials could not shed the assumption that the Irish needed to be reformed rather than merely rescued. Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury man who masterminded the relief effort, cast the famine as an intervention by divine providence, which could force the Irish off the potato and into a capitalist economy (never mind that they were already its victims). John Russell, who succeeded Peel, put his faith in public works, which paid the starving to learn industry. When road-building schemes proved too expensive and prone to distort the economy, workhouses funded by Irish ratepayers took up the civilizing mission, feeding people who toiled at such pointless tasks as stone breaking. Some workhouses complained of running out of stones.

Landlords grew tired of paying for these lessons and adopted a more brutal course: evicting struggling farmers (and their many subtenants), “unroofing” (destroying) their cottages, and turning over the land to wheat, oats, or sheep. The state backed them by harshly policing communities that responded with violence. The ensuing emigration of six million people in the following decades, which also made the famine part of North American history, reduced pressure on the land and on that “capricious staple” the potato, even as the blight dwindled (though it remains endemic to Ireland). Scanlan, who has a gimlet eye for macabre detail, tells us that the first emigrants went as living ballast in grain ships returning to North America. This Swiftian reduction of people to stuff captures what the famine tells us not just about the British empire but about the dangers awaiting any society that loses control of its economic destiny.