Rot: A History Of The Irish Famine
By Padraic X Scanlan
Published by Robinson, 2025, £12.99
Reviewed by Niall Mulholland
The ‘Irish potato famine’ (1845–52) as it is described by bourgeois history books in Britain, or An Gorta Mór (‘The Great Hunger’) as it is known by many Irish people, is not simply understood as a distant historical event in Ireland. It is passed down through generations, embedded in the collective psyche of a people whose poor ancestors were starved by the most powerful empire on earth while ships laden with grain and livestock sailed from Irish ports to English markets.
More than a million died. Two million fled, creating the diaspora that shapes Irish politics today. The population of Ireland has never recovered to its pre-famine level of 8.18 million (which was 31% of the entire UK population).
Across Ireland, physical remnants of the apocalypse still survive, such as ‘famine roads’ to nowhere, dry‑stone famine walls, and unused piers – all built under harsh public works schemes. Many communities also contain mass graves where the dead were buried without ceremony. The memory of colonial cruelty and trauma helps shape how many Irish people view the world. It explains why the sight of children starving in Gaza evoked empathy and rage.
Padraic X Scanlan’s book is about how capitalism kills, and how the ideologies that justified mass death in Ireland are basically the same ideologies being deployed today. His argument is devastating. The potato blight, Phytophthora infestans, struck across Europe in 1845 but only in Ireland did it produce a catastrophe of such proportions. The difference was the British Empire and its ideological commitment to so called free-market capitalism.
As Scanlan writes, 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”. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland “exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved”, while British officials refused to send aid, “believing that only free markets and wage labour could save the Irish”.
One of Scanlan’s most striking arguments is that Ireland was not an anachronism but a forerunner of capitalism’s global future. He writes: “Ireland before the famine, however, more closely resembled capitalism’s future than its past. Irish labourers were paid some of the lowest wages in the British empire, and they relied on the abundance of the potato to survive. The staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potatoes failed”.
The famine was the product of an Ireland that had been forcibly integrated into British capitalism through dispossession, conquest, and the destruction of native industry. Potato dependence was not a sign of racial backwardness but “an inherent feature of the entrenchment of the Irish economy into the British capitalist system after the Union of 1800”.
Ireland’s economy was a “precocious forerunner of the sort of ruthlessly competitive, export-oriented market economy that today blights the lives of millions around the globe”.
Scanlan shows how racialised stereotypes of the Irish were an ideological weapon that made mass starvation politically acceptable. The London Times dismissed the Irish as “potatophagi”, that is, a “race addicted to an easy food that allowed them to marry young and have too many children without thought of the future”. Queen Victoria blamed the famine on “the heedless and improvident way in which the poor Irish have long lived”.
Many people in Ireland today refer to the Great Hunger as a ‘genocide’. “But Britain didn’t perpetuate a genocide”, Scanlan controversially argues, “its choices reflected deep political beliefs in market forces that would reveal themselves to be anything but natural”. He notes that “there was no plan to destroy the potato crop and successive Conservative and Whig governments spent millions of pounds on famine relief”. The difference, he suggests, is one of intent.
Marx and Engels argued that the famine’s devastation was inseparable from the way British capitalism expanded while Ireland was kept agrarian, impoverished, and dependent. The Great Hunger was not the result of a conspiracy by individuals – though there were plenty of culpable figures in the British government and state officialdom, such as Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, the Treasury official, whose name has become synonymous with the cruel laissez‑faire policies that deepened the catastrophe.
Scanlan situates the Irish famine within a broader imperialist framework. In British-ruled India repeated famines killed tens of millions: “Ireland was not the only country to suffer from Britain’s laissez-faire belief. India lost tens of millions of lives in repeated droughts and famines. The Irish masses were among the first to experience a policy that would be repeated wherever the British Empire encountered populations it deemed racially inferior and economically ‘backward’”.
The poisonous role of racialised stereotypes played a major part in dividing the working class in Britain, where hundreds of thousands of desperate, starving Irish people fled during An Gorta Mór. As Marx and Engels argued, the oppression of Ireland was not a secondary matter but a central question for the workers’ movement in Britain itself: the liberation of the Irish people was essential to overcoming division and advancing the struggle for socialism.
For all its strengths, Rot is not without limitations. The book suffers from a one-sidedness: it is primarily a study in political economy, not a study in class struggle. The Irish poor appear largely as victims, starving, evicted, emigrating, or dying.
As the Oxford historian Marc Mulholland demonstrates in his sweeping new study, At the Rising of the Moon: The Peasantry and Ireland from the Tudor Conquest to the Fall of Landlordism, the Irish peasantry was not a passive mass awaiting their fate. From the 1760s, “the Irish peasantry developed a uniquely vigorous and continuous tradition of resistance and rebellion against landlord power that laid the foundations of the political upheaval that followed”. They “nearly made a revolution in the 1790s, endured appalling famine and orchestrated ‘extermination’ – eviction and sweeping away – in the 1840s, and [in later decades] overthrew the entire landlord system”.
The Irish poor did resist during the famine. They rioted for food, opposed rent and rate collection, challenged the decisions of those controlling relief works, and scorned clergymen who attributed their suffering to the Almighty.
These acts of resistance and the emergence of secret societies like the ‘Molly Maguires’, were elementary forms of class struggle. They were often desperate and localised, but they represented the Irish poor asserting what Michael Davitt, a founder of the Irish National Land League, called “the animal’s right to existence”.
The Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, though unsuccessful, was a direct response to the crisis. This took place during a period of tremendous surge in international class struggle: the Chartist movement in Britain and the revolutions of 1848 on the European continent.
James Connolly, the Irish revolutionary socialist executed by the British in 1916, indicted not only the British Empire but also the Irish nationalist leadership for their shared devotion to the rights of private property. In Labour in Irish History, Connolly argues that the 1848 Young Irelanders’ rebellion failed not due to military weakness primarily, but because its bourgeois leaders feared the social demands of the peasantry.
Connolly described the Young Irelanders’ conception of revolution with contempt: “English army on one side, provided with guns, bands and banners; Irish army on the other side, also provided with guns, bands and banners, ‘serried ranks with glittering steel’, no mere proletarian insurrection, and no interference with the rights of property”.
Connolly argued that the peasantry had been ready to revolt, but the leadership “from fear of the social land demands of the peasantry lost a favourable possibility for revolution and separation from England”.
Despite its limitations, Rot is a powerful indictment of British imperial rule and capitalism. The same ideology that killed a million Irish people, the belief that the market knows best, that state intervention distorts natural economic laws, that the poor are responsible for their own poverty, is alive and well today.
The famine was not ‘Providence’, as British officials liked to claim. It was integral to capitalism. And until the working class organises to overthrow the profit system, many new horrors will be inflicted on the working people of the world.