Padraic Scanlan - "Rot: Appetite and Political Economy in Ireland before the Famine".
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Development Studies and the Department of History and Classical Studies.
Padraic Scanlan's book Rot, on empire and the Irish famine, has met with widespread acclaim, including being the subject of a feature-length article in The New Yorker. T
Rot was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year; referred to by the Wall Street Journal as "undoubtedly a history title of the year"; and termed "an incredibly important work", by Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireworld.
Scanlan is also a former Honours History student in the Department of History and Classical Studies, Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾
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ABSTRACT:
On the eve of the Great Famine (1845-1851), British commentators speculated about the apparently limitless, even freakish appetite of the poorest Irish rural labourers for potatoes. Potatoes were more than a staple for the Irish poor; millions subsisted on potatoes, or potatoes and milk, and nothing else. To many officials and political economists, this total dependence on potatoes symbolised Irish antiquity. The Irish, by these lights, were an atavism in the United Kingdom, a people from another time who needed to be brought into the economic present, through land reform, labour discipline, and fresh injections of English capital. In reality, the potato made possible an endless squeeze on Irish labourers to produce crops for export, mostly to England and Scotland. Rather than insulating Ireland from the risks of nineteenth-century global capitalism, the potato economy left the very poorest workers in the United Kingdom exquisitely vulnerable to the perils of the market.