In the nineteenth century, as Britain became the world’s most powerful industrial empire, Ireland starved. The Great Famine fractured long-held assumptions about political economy and ‘civilisation’, threatening disorder in Britain itself. Ireland was a laboratory for empire, shaping British ideas about colonisation, population, ecology and work.
Scanlan reinterprets the history of this time and the result is a revelatory account of the Irish Great Famine (1845-1851). 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 and ‘civilization’ among the Irish. 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 relied on the abundance of the potato to survive. Scanlan expertly shows how 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.
Scanlan reinterprets the history of this time and the result is a revelatory account of the Irish Great Famine (1845-1851). 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 and ‘civilization’ among the Irish. 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 relied on the abundance of the potato to survive. Scanlan expertly shows how 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.
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Reviews
Praise for the author's Slave Empire: Powerful, often devastating, always compelling.
Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose.
Praise for the author's Slave Empire: Fresh and fascinating, a stunning narrative that shows how an empire built on slavery became an empire sustained and expanded by antislavery . . . deftly combines rich storytelling with vivid details and deep scholarship.
Praise for the author's Slave Empire: Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history.
Praise for the author's Slave Empire: This accessible synthesis of recent scholarship comes at the right time to help shape current debates about Britain and slavery.
Praise for the author's Slave Empire: Scanlan shows that the liberal empire of the nineteenth century was the outcome of the long encounter of antislavery and economic expansion founded on enslaved or unfree labour. Antislavery was itself the excuse for empire.
Praise for the author's Slave Empire: Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking.
Praise for the author's Slave Empire: A sweeping and devastating history of how slavery made modern Britain, and destroyed so much else . . . a shattering rebuke to the amnesia and myopia which still structure British history.