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...