Rot: A History of the Irish Famine

Rot (2023) is a compelling and controversial new study of the Irish famine, challenging traditional assumptions about political economy and civilization. It reveals the role of the British Empire's embrace of modern capitalism in causing the famine and its tragic legacy.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 13 March 2025
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

A vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine, "Rot: The Great Famine in Ireland" by Padraic Scanlan, is a richly underpinned and firmly rooted in historical scholarship. The book offers a vivid, polemical narrative that does justice to the victims and explains the ideologies that worsened the disaster. The Irish Independent describes the book as a history title of the year, while the Wall Street Journal praises it as a haunting and terrible book. The Great Famine, which occurred in the 1800s, fractured long-held assumptions about political economy and civilization, threatening disorder in Britain. Ireland was a laboratory for empire, shaping British ideas about colonization, population, ecology, and work. In Rot, Padraic Scanlan reinterprets the history of this time and the result is a revelatory account of Ireland's Great Famine. In the first half of the nineteenth century, nowhere in Europe or the world did the working poor depend as completely on potatoes as in Ireland. To many British observers, potatoes were evidence of a lack of modernity among the Irish. However, Ireland before the famine more closely resembled capitalism's future than its past. While poverty before and during the Great Famine was often blamed on Irish backwardness, it did in fact stem from the British Empire's embrace of modern capitalism. Uncovering the disaster's roots in Britain's deep imperial faith in markets and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Famine and its tragic legacy.

Weight: 552g
Dimension: 243 x 164 x 31 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472146878