What caused the Irish Famine?

Summary

History Extra Podcast: What Caused the Irish Famine?

Introduction

In the May 4, 2025 episode of the History Extra Podcast, hosted by Ellie Cawthorn and produced by Immediate Media, the focus is on unraveling the complexities behind the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. The episode features an in-depth conversation with historian Padrik Scanlan, author of the insightful book rot, which delves into the causes and impacts of the famine, linking it to the economic structures of the British Empire.

Understanding the Great Irish Famine [01:49 – 03:39]

Ellie Cawthorn opens the discussion by setting the stage for the Irish Famine, highlighting its devastating consequences between 1845 and 1851. Padrik Scanlan explains, “In Ireland, it's destroyed potato harvests more or less every year between 1845 and 1851, leading to widespread famine across Ireland and the deaths by famine-related causes of about a million people and the emigration of about a million and a half people, or perhaps more” (03:39).

Ireland's Relationship with the British Empire [05:45 – 07:55]

Scanlan provides a historical backdrop of Ireland's status within the British Empire. He notes that by the early 19th century, Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom following the Acts of Union, which dissolved the Irish Parliament and integrated it into the British political system. Despite this union, the economic and social structures disproportionately favored British interests, leaving the Irish economy, especially its poorest, in a precarious position.

Economic Structures and Land Pressures [07:56 – 10:58]

The conversation shifts to the economic dimensions that exacerbated the famine. Scanlan discusses two major factors:

1. Land Tenure: The expansion of British economic control increased the pressure on Irish land to produce rent. Irish landlords, often absentee, collected rent that was detached from the land's productivity, forcing Irish farmers to sublet their land into smaller plots to meet financial obligations. This subdivision led to increased vulnerability among the rural poor.

2. Dependence on the Potato: Originally a fallback crop, the potato became a staple in Ireland due to its affordability and high yield. However, this reliance made the population highly susceptible to agricultural failure. “As land became more subdivided, potatoes became more useful. As the utility of potatoes to producing rent became more obvious, potatoes spread further and further within the country” (07:56).

The Potato as a Cultural Symbol [10:58 – 14:15]

Scanlan elaborates on the potato's dual role in both the economy and culture. He explains that in Britain, the potato was stigmatized as a symbol of poverty and backwardness. This perception was leveraged politically, with British propagandists using it to portray the Irish as uncivilized. Conversely, in Ireland, the potato was vital for survival, creating deep social bonds but also making the population highly vulnerable to crop failures. “Potatoes are strongly associated in Britain by popularizers and propagandists with poverty” (11:20).

Impact of the Potato Blight [14:15 – 18:01]

When the potato blight struck in 1845, it was not an isolated event. However, its recurrence in 1846 severely impacted Ireland, unmasking the fragile economic structures. Scanlan points out that previous crop failures were known to the British government, but the scale and recurrence of the blight in 1846 caught them off guard, leading to catastrophic outcomes. He describes the social collapse: “It's hard to put yourself into that place imaginatively to understand just how completely society fell apart, at least for the very poor” (18:01).

Collapse of Social Structures [18:01 – 21:28]

The famine didn't merely cause physical starvation; it dismantled the very fabric of Irish social life. Traditional practices centered around the potato, such as communal sharing during harvests, were disrupted. The inability to perform customary mourning rituals further eroded social cohesion. Scanlan emphasizes, “The loss of the potato crop wasn't just physical hardship. It sort of shredded the basic fabric” (18:01).

Societal Impact and British Response [21:28 – 25:28]

Scanlan critiques the British government's response to the famine, highlighting a rigid adherence to market principles and inadequate relief efforts. Public works and grain imports were insufficient and poorly managed, exacerbating the suffering. He argues, “The pressures of the imperial and UK economy made Ireland susceptible to economic catastrophe... the only solution the United Kingdom could think of... was to apply more of the same” (25:28). This approach prioritized economic stability over humanitarian relief, deepening the crisis.

Potential Alternatives and Historical Constraints [25:37 – 30:27]

Addressing what could have been done differently, Scanlan reflects on the limitations imposed by the political and economic ideologies of the time. He discusses Daniel O'Connell’s proposals for mitigating the famine, such as closing Irish ports and reducing grain duties, which were politically unfeasible within the existing British framework. “The tragedy of the great Famine... is that any alternative possibility for mitigating the famine was just impossible within the political conditions at the time” (25:37).

Comparison with England’s Response [30:27 – 33:36]

Comparing Ireland's plight to England, Scanlan notes that similar potato crop failures in England did not result in famine due to better infrastructure and more flexible poor relief systems. England’s implementation of the Poor Law allowed for more effective distribution of aid, whereas Ireland’s strict adherence to market principles and prohibition of outdoor relief hampered relief efforts. “Ireland was a part of the UK... but there was a completely different, more agrarian, more vulnerable way of organizing economic life” (33:36).

Modern Implications and Lessons [33:53 – 37:48]

Drawing parallels to contemporary issues, Scanlan connects the Irish Famine to modern challenges like climate change. He underscores the structural nature of such crises, emphasizing that they stem from human decisions and economic systems rather than being purely natural disasters. “Disasters happen to us... like a volcano erupting is a natural disaster, but if it destroys a town, the existence of that town... is a product of human decision making” (37:48). This perspective urges a reevaluation of how societies respond to and mitigate large-scale crises.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with Scanlan reflecting on the enduring legacy of the Irish Famine and its lessons for today. He emphasizes the importance of understanding structural vulnerabilities and the impact of economic policies on vulnerable populations. Ellie Cawthorn wraps up by referencing Scanlan’s previous work, highlighting the interconnectedness of historical events and their lasting influence.

Notable Quotes

• “In Ireland, it's destroyed potato harvests more or less every year between 1845 and 1851, leading to widespread famine...” (03:39)
• “Potatoes are strongly associated in Britain by popularizers and propagandists with poverty” (11:20)
• “The loss of the potato crop wasn't just physical hardship. It sort of shredded the basic fabric” (18:01)
• “The tragedy of the great Famine... is that any alternative possibility for mitigating the famine was just impossible within the political conditions at the time” (25:37)
• “Disasters happen to us... like a volcano erupting is a natural disaster, but if it destroys a town, the existence of that town... is a product of human decision making” (37:48)

Final Thoughts

This episode of the History Extra Podcast provides a comprehensive exploration of the Great Irish Famine, intertwining economic history, social dynamics, and political critique. Padrik Scanlan offers a nuanced perspective, challenging simplistic narratives and highlighting the deep-seated structural issues that transformed a natural blight into a humanitarian catastrophe. For those interested in understanding the multifaceted causes of the Irish Famine and its broader implications, this episode is an enlightening listen.

Transcript

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[Ellie Cawthorn]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In the 1840s, famine hit Ireland with devastating consequences. Ireland wasn't the only country to experience a potato blight in that decade. So what were the circumstances in Ireland at that time that turned this agricultural issue into a catastrophe that shattered social structures and caused more than a million deaths? Padrik Scanlan's new book, rot, examines the causes and impact of the famine, linking the disaster to the economic structures of the British Empire, and I spoke to him to find out more. Thanks so much for joining me today to talk about your New book, rot, which is a history of the Irish famine. For anyone listening who isn't familiar with what happened in Ireland across the 1840s or maybe doesn't know too much, can you very briefly just introduce us to this dark chapter in the country's history?

[Advertiser 1]

Yeah. So in 1845, a novel pathogen. I always mispronounce it, but it's Phythoptera infestans, P. Infestans spread from the Americas to Europe. And it's a pathogen of nightshades, so of potatoes and tomatoes. And it spread really quickly across much of Western Europe and Ireland. But in Ireland, it's destroyed potato harvests more or less every year between 1845 and 1851, leading to widespread famine across Ireland and the deaths by famine related causes of about a million people and the emigration of about a million and a half people, or perhaps more. So that was the great Irish Famine.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

So your previous work focuses on labor and it focuses on empire. What made you want to talk about the Irish Famine? Because on the surface this seems like quite a different subject. But why did you think it needed re examining through a different lens?

[Advertiser 1]

Yeah, a lot of my previous historical work is on the history of the transition from enslaved to free labor in the British Empire and on ideas of freedom and ideas of free labor and on British anti slavery kind of broadly. And so one of the things that I noticed, especially in my work on the immediate post emancipation period in the Caribbean, right after 1834, after the coming into force of the 1833 abolition of slavery act, is the comparison between recently emancipated apprenticed laborers in the Caribbean and Irish agricultural laborers in Ireland. Not to say, and I think one of the things that I try to emphasize in the book that there's this particularly among the Irish diaspora, maybe just in North America, but I think pretty broadly there is still this idea that the Irish were enslaved by the British Empire, which is this sort of toxic myth that I think is useful for all kinds of nefarious political purposes. But it is still true that in the wake of emancipation in the Caribbean, poor Irish laborers were one of the main points of comparison for recently emancipated Caribbean laborers. And so I was interested in the relationship between, I guess, extreme poverty and ideas of free labor. And that's really where the origins of the book intellectually came from. And so the rod is designed to kind of in the first half of the book, understand and explain the really unique position of Ireland within both the United Kingdom and the British Empire. And then in the second Half of the book show how that unique and uniquely precarious position fell apart when the Blight arrived in 1845.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

Well, in that case, let's talk about that first aspect there. Ireland's role within the British Empire at this time. So, by the time of the 1840s or the 1830s leading up to the Famine, what exact was the relationship between Britain and Ireland?

[Advertiser 1]

Without going into a really long ancient history lesson, although I think in the history of Ireland and Britain, it's very hard not to. Ireland had been at least a notional possession of England and then Britain since the Middle Ages. And in the course of the medieval era and the early modern era, that relationship rose and fell. And so England's claims to Ireland were sometimes very real and sometimes they were basically scraps of paper. And so in the course of the 18th century, Ireland wasn't a colony, although I argue in rot, it was certainly subject to colonialism. It wasn't literally a colony. It was an independent kingdom with its own parliament that was under the supervision and direct control of the British Parliament. In the course of the 18th century, though, the Irish economy became more and more oriented towards exports to Britain, and more and more limited by a series of commercial regulations that were intended to prevent competition between Irish merchants and English merchants. And then at the end of the 18th century, during the Napoleonic wars, there was a really substantial revolutionary uprising in Ireland called the United Irish Rebellion. And in the wake of the United Irish Rebellion, and in the face of the continuing threat of Napoleonic France, the Irish Parliament dissolved and was integrated into an entirely new polity, the United Kingdom. And under the Acts of Union, Ireland sent 100 MPs to Westminster. Irish lords and bishops were integrated into the House of Lords. And Ireland was, by the second or third decade of the 19th century, at least on paper, wholly integrated into the UK. So there was a single currency, there were no internal passports, there was freedom of movement. If someone moved from the Irish countryside to Liverpool, as many tens of thousands of people did, they didn't need papers to do it. They were moving from one part of the United Kingdom to the next. So on the eve of the Famine, Ireland was a part of the uk. However, all of the economic and social and political structures that had been built in the 18th century didn't disappear with the active union, they were changed by it. But they continued to place the Irish economy, and especially the poorest people within the Irish economy, in an extraordinarily vulnerable position.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

How so?

[Advertiser 1]

There's kind of two major dimensions. One has to do with land so one of the features of the expansion of British economic control in Ireland was increasing pressure on the Irish countryside to produce agricultural products and to produce rent. And so in Ireland, the landlord class, many of them didn't actually visit their land, and they collected rent. And so Ireland became a means for a new kind of landed aristocracy to collect rent from agricultural land. And that pressure floated free of the market. So some Irish land is very productive, some isn't. But the rents that people paid on land had nothing to do with what the land could produce. They floated on the market. Ireland was also, because of the circumstances of conquest, starved of capital. So there wasn't a lot of capital investment in Ireland, which, on the one hand, meant that it didn't have the kind of mass enclosures of land that people in the English countryside experienced in the 18th century. And actually, in Ireland, there was kind of an opposite phenomenon where instead of a mass enclosure of land, there was a intense subdivision of land. So farmers who would rent smaller leases than their English counterparts would then chop up their own land into smaller and smaller pieces in order to generate rent, in order to pay their own rent, because they couldn't actually pay the rent on their land from what their land produced. They needed to both sell everything that they made and collect rent from subtenants. And so that pressure on land meant that the people at the bottom were under an extraordinary amount of pressure to produce rent. Their leases were short. There was a particular kind of lease called the con acre lease that was a lease for 10 or 11 months of the year. And so part of the precarity of the Irish economy is based on land tenure. And the other element is the potato. Right. You know, it's so indelibly associated with Ireland and Irishness, but it's not native to Ireland. It's an American crop. And so the potato was adopted in Ireland, as it was adopted elsewhere in Europe, as a kind of fallback crop in the 17th century, a protection against marauding armies, a way that peasants could ensure that they didn't starve to death in the midst of the little Ice Age and brutal religious wars of the 17th century. But then in the 18th century, the potato went from being a fallback crop in Ireland to being a staple, and then went from being a staple to being a kind of hyper staple staple. So people grew potatoes because they're cheap, they can yield good quantities, at least in good years. They survive on mediocre land. And so you could have an economy where people were selling all of the agricultural products that they produced, all the oats, all the grain, all the pigs, all the cattle, all the dairy, and at the same time, just eating potatoes. And so those twin pressures kind of worked in synchronicity with each other. As land became more subdivided, potatoes became more useful. As the utility of potatoes to producing rent became more obvious, potatoes spread further and further within the country. And so by the eve of the potato famine, you had, you know, millions of people in Ireland. Not everybody in Ireland, but the very poorest people in Ireland, of whom there were many, survived more or less only.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

On potato, as well as the potato's role in the economy. Something that you highlight in the book is the potato's role also as a cultural symbol. You say that the potato became a symbol of Irish backwardness. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that and about British attitudes towards the Irish in this era. Because that's a important part of this story, isn't it?

[Advertiser 1]

Yeah. So potatoes are strongly associated in Britain by popularizers and propagandists with poverty. And in part they're associated with poverty because very poor people eat them, both in Ireland and in continental Europe, but also because in the midst of the 18th century, British ideas about empire became entangled with an idea of civilization. And civilization was an extremely vague and often internally contradictory concept. But one of its kind of more durable features over time was a sense that division of labor equals civilization. And so if you're eating bread, you're producing a crop that requires purchasing grain, sowing grain, it probably requires manufactured equipment to sow the grain. It requires wage laborers to collect it. It requires, you know, threshing and milling and baking. So there are all of these steps between planting wheat and eating bread, whereas a potato, you know, you can just pull it out of the ground. I wouldn't suggest eating it raw, but, you know, you can boil it with what seemed to British eyes at least, to be the most kind of primitive of technologies. And British observers made a great deal out of the fact that the kind of the three legged pots that were really common in Ireland at the time and actually quite common in Britain as well, but that was sort of overlooked, were very similar to pots that were in use in the Iron Age. Right. So the idea is like, ah, here are the Irish eating this primitive crop that requires no labor to produce. So it became very strongly associated with poverty in British culture. And you can read if you look at the newspapers in the first half of the 19th century, it's a really common symbol when workers in the industrial areas of England organize in what were called combinations or early trade unions. You know, they'll march with a bag of salt and a potato nailed to a placard as a symbol of, like, this is what you've reduced us to. You are subjecting our civilization to degeneration by requiring us to eat potatoes. And so the potato becomes strongly associated in British culture or in British political economy with a lack of civilization. And in Ireland, it becomes associated with basically everything. Right? It's deeply, deeply important to how people understand their lives in the countryside. It's more than a staple, you know, it's an absolute necessity for life. And that necessity, the fact that Irish people see the potato correctly as a necessity, only adds to the general vilification of Irish poverty and Irish culture within the British Empire.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

So we have the potato at this point, as you say, a hyper staple, but also this really significant symbol. So when the potato blight hits, it doesn't just hit Ireland, it does hit other places in Europe as well. But what is the impact on Ireland in particular? Is it certain areas that were badly affected, or was the impact felt across the country?

[Advertiser 1]

So it's worth noting, actually, before answering that question, that potatoes in Ireland are vulnerable to collapse well before the arrival of the blight. And so there was in the 1740s, a very serious loss of potato crop that led to proportionately an even higher rate of death in Ireland than during the great famine of 1845-1851. And after the Union, which is, I think, a better point of comparison, there were pretty serious failures, serious local failures of the potato crop in Ireland in 1817, in the 1820s, in 1830, 1831. So potatoes failed. And the British government, or the government of the uk, knew that potatoes failed. And so when the potato crop failed because of the blight in 1845, it wasn't unexpected, it was certainly regretted. But it didn't arrive as a bolt out of the blue, because the potato blight had been spreading in Belgium and in the Netherlands and in Prussia and Poland and as far north as Scandinavia throughout the summer of 1845. But what really made it catastrophic in Ireland was the fact that the Blight returned in 1846. Initially in 1847. The UK government, led at the time by Robert Peel, had a kind of playbook for dealing with failures of the Irish potato that was based on what had happened in those previous crop failures earlier in the century. And it was based on importing grain for the Irish to buy and instituting public works projects so that people would have money with which to buy the imported grain. And so in 1845, it's kind of hard to gauge the extent to which that first wave of the blight contributed to the overall catastrophe of the blight. But when the blight returned in the autumn of 1846, nobody expected that that had never happened before. And that's what really set in motion the worst year nationally, at least for the famine. What historians and people at the time referred to as Black 47 the winter of 1846. 1847. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to.

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[Ellie Cawthorn]

And obviously this is quite difficult to sum up, but can you give us a sense of what the famine was like for those communities who had to live through it?

[Advertiser 1]

It's kind of hard to imagine the extent to which the everyday structures of like family, work, political, economic life collapsed. Right? I mean, I think it's hard from our perspective now to recognize like it's hard to put yourself into that place imaginatively to understand just how completely society fell apart, at least for the very poor. I think one of the consequences of the potato being the basis of everything among the rural Irish poor is that when it's gone, it destroys not just the main form of subsistence, but A lot of the basic forms of social life and sociability. One of the features of the potato that I try to emphasize in the book is that the potatoes are abundant, right? They provide abundance, at least in the seasons when they are bountiful. You can understand why people were enraptured by this crop. Like, you can turn one potato into 15 potatoes, and you can turn a 10 pound bag of potatoes into a thousand pounds of potatoes in good years, right? Because if you keep planting those cuttings year in and year out, you can drive up yields, but you increase the susceptibility to disease and pests and all kinds of other problems. In good years, though, in Ireland, the Irish poor had something that the English poor never had or rarely had, which was the ability to give something to somebody else without thinking about the cost of themselves. So at harvest time in good years, people would go around begging, and it was considered not just gauche, but sort of deeply antisocial to not just give potatoes. And it was considered deeply dishonorable to count how many potatoes you had left. These are 18th century rituals that emerge because of the dependence on the potato, but they form a lot of the basic ties of sociability and social life in the poorest parts of rural Ireland on the eve of the famine. And so the famine brings with it all of the physical hardships of a lack of food, right? People die of influenza, they die of typhus, they die of dysentery. People are forced together into workhouses and labor camps, and disease spreads readily among them, right? And so people are huddled together. A lot of people die of respiratory illnesses. But at the same time, in addition to those brutal physical hardships and people starving to death and, you know, children unable to bury their parents, and parents unable to bury their children. And the people who fled Ireland in 1846, 1847, were people who had the means to flee. So in addition to all of those hardships, you also have the collapse of the basic fabric of sociability among the very poor. There are anthropologists who have noted how preoccupied with death Irish culture is, and it would be easy to think, oh, the famine is a cause of that. But that's not quite right, because that preoccupation with death preceded the famine. And in some ways, one of the most horrific things about the famine was that people were too sick and too tired and too starving to be able to carry out the usual rituals of death and mourning. The famine, in fact, made it impossible for people to honor that relationship to people who are dead and dying. And so, you know, the loss of the potato crop wasn't just physical hardship. It sort of shredded the basic fabric.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

Of social life because it's not just about people who are specifically farming potatoes, is it? It's got a much wider impact. How did it kind of spread throughout society?

[Advertiser 1]

One of the features of the famine that became legendary, especially for the diaspora, was the idea that during the famine, Ireland continued to export agricultural products to England, which is true, but at the same time, in 1847, I think it's 1847, it was the first year in the recent history of Ireland when Ireland imported more grain than it exported, exported. So one of the consequences of the blight for the entire society was the complete collapse of the whole system of labor. One of the features of the plan to blunt the impact of the blight on the countryside was the system of public works. And that was something that was especially emphasized by the Whig Prime Minister who followed Peel into office after Peel fell, after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Russell didn't really change the basic UK relief policy, but rather than emphasizing importing grain as Peel had done, he emphasized public works. And the idea was, for Russell, a good Whig, a good liberal, that the moral hazard of giving people food and producing in them a kind of dependence on the state, especially for people as poor as the Irish poor and as ostensibly uncivilized as the Irish poor, the moral hazard of giving something away for free was worse than the immediate short term pain even of organizing a system of public works. But the system of public works was designed to encourage people to work privately, right? So if you worked on the public works, you earned at least $0.02 less than whatever the local average wage was. The idea was that that would create a deterrent, force people to work on farms. But because of the collapse of the economy, there weren't any farms to work on, right? So you had this situation where places that had been producing grain suddenly stopped producing grain or had to produce grain and export it basically with armed guards to prevent people from attacking the wagon trains. You had a lot of landlords who immediately started to consider switching over the lands that they had under tillage to graze cattle instead of growing wheat or growing oats. So you had just a kind of a general widespread collapse of the economy. And at the same time, right, there's a kind of bizarre double vision that imperial officials take when they look at what's happening in Ireland, right. They can see that the economy is collapsing, but at the same time they are preoccupied with preserving the economy into the future. Right? So they have this kind of double vision where they can see that people are dying of typhus, people are starving to death. Ireland, the materials that it is producing, it's producing under extreme duress and extreme hardship. But preserving that system seems more valuable. And it seems so valuable that people are still getting evicted, right? In fact, more people are getting evicted for non payment of rent. You know, there's something that really did happen, right, that was one of the kind of symbols of the famine was unroofing, right, where people who were living in rented cottages, bailiffs would show up and rip the roofs off so that they couldn't live in them and then send them out. It was like all of the pressures of the normal economy didn't relentless in the course of the blight. In fact, they increased. And so one of the arguments I try to make across rot is that, you know, many of the economic conditions that turned the biological event of the arrival of p infestants in Ireland into a famine were precisely the same forces that were applied to try to mitigate the famine, right? So the pressures of the imperial and UK economy made Ireland susceptible to economic catastrophe in the face of an event like the arrival of the blight. But the solution, the only solution that the United Kingdom could think of, the only one that was kind of admitted within the horizons of possibility of the empire at that time, was to apply more of the same, right? So the problems in Ireland were made, I argue, by the inexorable pressure of the market. But the only solutions that policymakers could imagine relied on applying the pressures of the market to preserve the already fragile, ostensibly fragile, civilization of the Irish poor.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

Of course, with alternate histories, you never know exactly how things would turn out. But what do you think that the British government could or should have done to help relieve the famine?

[Advertiser 1]

I mean, I have no idea, truth be told. And one of the things that I've discovered that has always been kind of at the background of my scholarship is the fault line between visions of how to do history based on the tools of economics and econometrics, and visions of how to do history based on the tools of humanistic inquiry. And I think there are quite a few economic historians whose work I rely on a lot in rot, who use methods that rely on counterfactual. Right. If the British government had done X, then Y would have happened. But I think one of the things that I've kind of concluded while writing the book is that I think that's a very different kind of game than what historians like me are doing. And so. I don't know. Right. I think the tragedy of the great Famine for me, or one of the tragedies in addition to the horrific loss of human life and the traumatic beginning or the traumatic acceleration of the Irish diaspora in the rest of the world, is that any alternative possibility for mitigating the famine was just impossible within the political conditions at the time. So another kind of illustrative example, one of the great heroes of 19th century Irish history, Daniel O'Connell, who was the leader of the campaign for Catholic emancipation In the late 1820s, in 1829, that got rid of the final restrictions on the civil rights of Catholics in The United Kingdom, O'Connell, when the famine struck, convened a committee where he proposed a whole bunch of solutions that, to a modern reader, seem very plausible. He proposed closing Ireland's ports and selling Ireland's oats and wheat back to the Irish rather than exporting it. He proposed some things that actually the UK government ended up doing, like public works. He proposed immediately lowering the duties on imported grains. So he proposed all these kind of emergency measures that would protect the Irish poor and. And discouraged the export of agricultural products from Ireland. And we can look at those. You know, you see oconnell's proposal and you think, ah, that's what they should have done, right? But then you recognize that in some ways, O'Connell was sort of playing. He had a kind of free play to make those proposals, because O'Connell wasn't. He was a very, very respected parliamentarian, but he was not at the center of power. And what he was proposing, he knew that he could offer kind of outlandish proposals for rhetorical effect, because he knew that there was no way, considering how the government of the United Kingdom was constituted in 1845, 1846, that those proposals would ever pass. Like, there was just no constituency in Parliament for closing Ireland's ports, and that includes Irish MPs. It was just unthinkable in the era that kind of interference with the normal progress of trade in a country whose empire was built on its dominance of global trade. The idea that it would foreclose upon trade within the United Kingdom itself in order to try to save the lives of the Irish poor seemed so dangerous that it was basically beyond possibility. And so there are things now, like, if you think about how famines are relieved in the present, right. There are things that the British government could have done, but without a kind of revolutionary change of government in 1845, without, like, sort of the overthrow of the entire system that had made the United Kingdom into what it was and made the British Empire into what it was. That couldn't have happened. There is a kind of myth in the diaspora that Britain did nothing. And first of all, there's a misapprehension there because Ireland was part of the United Kingdom at this time. And I think there were certainly dividing lines between Britain and Ireland. The union wasn't a happy one by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a single country. But there's this idea that the government of the United Kingdom did nothing. And the more extreme version of that is that the government of the United Kingdom deliberately planted the blight in Ireland to kill everybody. But that's not true. The government of the United Kingdom did a lot to try to mitigate the Irish famine. They threw, you know, the equivalent in present day terms of millions or maybe even billions of pounds of borrowed money at trying to keep the Irish economy moving. But they couldn't see past their basic assumptions about how the Irish economy functioned and should have functioned. So they threw money and personnel and treasure at mitigating the famine, but did nothing. And I think that that's one of the real tragedies of the famine, is that the political possibilities for the government of the United Kingdom were so circumscribed by the kind of exhilarating romance of early industrial capitalism that they couldn't see any other option and ended up spending colossal amounts of money to do nothing. And in some cases, worse than nothing.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

One intriguing question, though, further to your point about not dealing in alternate histories. You might not want to engage in this, but how do you think that the response might have differed if this had happened in England?

[Advertiser 1]

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, it did happen in England. Right. The potato crops were lost all across England as well. The difference was all of the solutions that existed. I mean, in some ways, like the loss of potato crops for English agricultural laborers could be offset, first of all, by better communications within the country. Right. One of the problems in the depths of the Irish famine wasn't that there wasn't enough food. It's that no one could bring it to people where they needed it. And that wasn't the case in England. By the 1840s, in England and in Scotland as well, where there was also really substantial loss of potato crop, there's just more ways of delivering grain for purchase to people in the countryside. England also had the possibility of internal economic movement. Right. So people left the countryside and moved towards the industrial north. Right. There were other places where people could work. Right. There were other industries that were available, and people certainly fled Ireland to move to places like Liverpool and Manchester, but they arrived there and ended up at the very bottom. But, yeah, I mean, I think the English just seemed more civilized to their own government. And I think you can really see the lines between England and Ireland within the United Kingdom at play there. One of the biggest pieces of legislation of the reforming era of the 1830s was the reform of the English Poor Law. And the English Poor Law was modified to devolve responsibility for poor relief onto local poor law unions, which would collect local taxes and operate workhouses. And the idea was the workhouse was built on the principle of less eligibility. That is to say that whatever you got in the workhouse had to be worse than what was available outside in order to make the workhouse an effective deterrent. But in practice, although the initial Poor Law commissioners were very austere in their view of the Poor Law, as the poor law made its way through legislation and then went into operation, one of the big concessions that was made by the government was to allow what was called outdoor relief, which was the idea that in times of distress, which was the general term that was used for these kinds of moments, in times of distress, Poor Law unions could provide wages, they could provide work, and they could provide food directly. In 1838, Ireland had its own poor law instituted, the Irish Poor Law. It was otherwise a carbon copy of the English Poor Law, except it absolutely prohibited outdoor relief in all circumstances. And in fact, in 1847, it took an amendment to the Irish Poor Law that was extreme, explicitly framed in legislation as temporary, to allow the establishment of soup kitchens to feed people temporarily. And it was always emphasized that that would be temporary. And moreover, it was paid for mostly by donations from around the world. So the basic structures of poor relief in England were more flexible. The infrastructure for delivering food to people in England was more flexible. So it just. It was just a different sort of situation. Right. Ireland was part of the UK and its economy depended on its relationship to the uk, but it was a completely different, more agrarian, more vulnerable way of organizing economic life.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

Something you said in the book that I found super interesting was this idea that at the time, famine was seen as something antiquated, something almost medieval. But actually, in your opinion, this famine was grounded in really modern issues. I wonder if you could explain what you mean by that.

[Advertiser 1]

Sure. So, yeah, the question of what hunger is for is at the root of what in the 1840s was still the incredibly prestigious discipline of political economy, which is the not Identical to contemporary economics, but certainly the ancestor of contemporary economics. And so the question of what hunger was for was on the minds of theorists of economic life, most famously Malthus, Thomas Robert Malthus, who hypothesized that under natural conditions, population increases exponentially and food production increases geometrically. And so famine is basically inevitable under normal conditions. And so Malthus speculates in his essay on the principle of population, that in a sense, it's civilization again, that amorphous concept that keeps famine at bay. And so it's people who are able to recognize and understand their own economic conditions and basically exercise sexual restraint and not have children. Right. And that's what keeps famine at bay in civilized societies. But at the same time, there's a thread of thinking in early political economy that theorizes that in the end, hunger is what gets people to work at base. And so if you want people to labor, there needs to be scarcity. In a world of complete abundance, there would be no labor. And so there's this idea that hunger is important to economic modernity, but at the same time, famine maybe is a sort of recrudescence of the past into the present. And that's certainly what John Russell says or said to the House of Commons in the winter of 1847. And I'm paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of, this is a famine of the 13th century. It's the 14th century being visited upon a people of the 19th. Right. The idea being that this is like a famine of the 14th century in the sense that it's caused by a natural calamity that was a kind of act of God that swept down upon a vulnerable peasantry that has destroyed their way of life, and that the suffering of the Irish has nothing to do really with present day economic conditions and everything to do with a kind of atavistic return to a dark past. Right. So it's actually like living through the black Death. Right. Rather than living through a very, in my view, a very modern ecological, economic and political crisis. And so that does a lot of work for the British Empire because it helps to conceal the fact that the basic structures that turned the arrival of potato blight into an extensive famine were new. Right. Between the 14th century and the 19th century in Ireland, all of these structures of rule and extraction and exploitation and political domination were created. And that's what turned the accident of the arrival of p infestans in Ireland to a famine. And so, you know, I think that idea says a lot about how the British Empire saw itself in relationship to its own development in relationship to civilization. But it also shows a lot about how faith in the market blinded British officials to economic reality and made it very difficult for them to see clearly what was happening in Ireland. And I think some people did see it clearly, but those people tended to not be in a position to intervene. And some of those people who saw it clearly and were in a position to intervene made the calculation that on balance, it was better to find, follow a well established pattern than to risk the degeneration of the civilization of the United Kingdom because of impolitic or imprudent government response.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

And finally, leading on from that, if we are to see this as something caused by modern issues, by economic issues and globalization, obviously in our current era, there's a lot of talk about climate, food and resource. Is there anything that we could look back at this incident of the famine and take from it for today?

[Advertiser 1]

A couple of things. The first is that, you know, I think it's hard to understand climate change as the consequence, and it's in fact impossible to understand climate change as the consequence of individual decisions. I think that's one of the things that makes it so difficult to mitigate in any kind of organized way, is that it's not actually the consequence of any individual decision. The seedbed of anthropogenic climate change is not like if you go and drive in your car to the grocery store, you are producing greenhouse gases, but you're not responsible for climate change except in such a unbelievably attenuated and complex way. And I think one of the ways that governments today shift their own responsibility, because if anybody has responsibility, it strikes me as being governments and regulators are the entities that are big enough to make policy choices that can actually mitigate the consequences of climate change. But you can always downshift the responsibility into individuals, right? You can say, actually it's you, right? Like you bought a pack of plastic straws, but the existence of those plastic straws has nothing to do with you. So that's one of the lessons, right, is to say that when you have a problem that is structural, it becomes very hard to see those structures. And I think I can see them clearly in the past, but that doesn't mean I have the same clarity in the present. It's easier to excavate and understand the deep structures of an economy, of political life, and understand where catastrophe comes from, where crisis comes from in hindsight. And so that's one element, and the other has to do with just the way that we think about the natural World. So P. Infestans, right, is a biological entity. It is native to, plant geneticists think, the central valleys of Mexico near Mexico City, where potatoes are grown as a food crop, but also grow wild, as they do in a lot of central and northern South America. It arrived in Europe and arrived in the Americas via probably a shipment of seed potatoes, maybe a shipment of fertilizer. So a lot of historians speculate that it was a shipment of seed potatoes from the Americas that were infected with pea infestans. That may, in fact, have been the only. Only first introduction of this organism into Europe, which would make it unique, maybe in the history of ecological invasion and introduction. Because usually, like the cane toad in Australia, for example, was introduced more than once, Right? It usually takes more than one introduction for an introduced species to establish itself. But plant geneticists think that maybe it could have even been a single spore of P. Infestans, because all of the potatoes that have been found in archives there aren't that many seem to have the exact same haplotype. So they seem to be the exact same organism, which would be really remarkable. But the point is that. So this is a biological entity, but it's not a natural disaster in any meaningful way. The potatoes arrive because of international commerce. They come in steamships that have the climactic conditions that make it possible for this organism to survive. Over time, they spread across potato fields, at least in Ireland, that look extremely extraordinarily old, but are, in fact, adaptations to 18th century economic conditions, and they're not old at all. And the fact that Irish potato fields are super close together with virtually no fire breaks none of the kinds of features that might keep this fungus, like water mold, from spreading from field to field, all that stuff is man made. So I think the other big lesson that the famine teaches us is that we should be skeptical about claims that natural disasters are acts of God and not a consequence of the human modification of the natural world. Right? There aren't really any natural disasters. Disasters happen to us, right? Like a volcano erupting is a natural disaster, but if it destroys a town, the existence of that town at the foot of a volcano is a product of human decision making and human invention. And so that's, I think, another lesson about the famines and not treat it as a bolt from the blue. Not to treat it as like a kind of providential act of God there to expose the perfidy of the English or the virtue of the Irish, or as like a punishment for the Irish or anything like that. But to see it as the consequence of human decisions and human structures.

[Ellie Cawthorn]

That was Pedric Scanlon speaking to me Ellie Cawthorn about his book A History of the Irish Famine. I've spoken to Patrick on the podcast before about his previous book, Slave Empire. It was a really fascinating conversation about the connections between the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism. You can listen to it by searching for how slavery fueled the British Empire. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.