Ideas - How Britain caused Ireland's Great Famine

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

The potato and the Irish Famine of 1845 will forever be linked. But what's often overlooked is how deeply connected the potato was to British colonial policies during that time. To Britain it was a symbol of Irish backwardness. In the book Rot, a new history of Ireland's Great Famine is revealed, showing how the British Empire caused the infamous disaster. Author and historian Padraic X Scanlan paints a complex and compelling picture of the Irish Famine of 1845, in which the potato — and the blight — played but a part in a broader story of colonialism, capitalism, and collapse.

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Book at Spexavers.cavers.captiasties are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.com to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Before we start this ideas podcast, could you follow us on the app you're using? It's the easiest way to find out about new episodes as they drop. If you already follow us, thank you so much. Maybe you could give us a review or a rating. And if there is an episode you can't stop thinking about, please recommend it to a friend. Every little bit you do helps other listeners find ideas. Now on to today's podcast. So I'll begin with an historical question that could also be the setup to a joke. How many

potatoes did the Irishmen eat? Welcome to ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. According to many histories of the Irish famine, the answer is 12 to 14 pounds of potatoes a day whenever supplies allowed. Now for reference, 12 to 14 pounds of potatoes is slightly more than the big paper and mesh bags of potatoes that you might buy at the supermarket. The Irish and their potatoes, a match made sometime in the 16th century. The potato is not native to Europe. It's native to the Americas, especially to Central and South America. And so the potato is part of a whole group of plants and animals that cross the Atlantic. back from the Americas to Europe

after the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas. If you want to get a clearer picture, both of Ireland and of globalization, it's important to know where potatoes originally come from. You might say it's the first step in demythologizing the great famine of 1845 when at least one million Irish people starve to death. This out of a population at the time of more,

than 8 million. At night, people regularly stole potatoes from the field. They would send their children secretly to milk or bleed cows. Rather than filling bellies, potato dependence emptied them. A good next step would be distinguishing the blight that destroyed the potatoes from the Irish famine itself. The blight killed potatoes everywhere in Western Europe. It killed potatoes everywhere in the Americas.

But it was only in Ireland that that biological event created. a humanitarian disaster that was so profound and so long-lasting that it permanently changed the political and economic and cultural history of the place where it struck. That's Padrake X. Scanlan, historian and author of Rott, an imperial history of the Irish famine. It was the features of the Irish economy. Like, that's really what the rot of the title refers to, right? It's the structures that had been built up over centuries, placing Ireland within the United Kingdom and within the empire

and placing the Irish poor in particular in a uniquely fragile and precarious position that made the biological event of the blight into the catastrophe of the famine. In his book, Rot, Padrick Scanlan describes how the Irish over-dependence on potatoes and the unwavering faith of the English in the power of the market

led to a truly modern catastrophe in a land that looked ancient and backward to colonialize, eyes that somehow saw an Irishman eating 12 to 14 pounds of potatoes every day. The maximum stomach capacity of an average adult, that is the amount of food that can be physically held in the stomach without causing bodily harm, is about 4 liters. The average potato comes in at about 675 grams of weight per liter of volume. All that to say that it is physically possible,

for an adult to eat about six pounds of potatoes in a meal without rupturing the stomach lining. So the Irishman could have eaten four or more pounds of potatoes three times a day, but every meal would have been a test of endurance and a nauseating ordeal. Padrick Scanlon spoke in October 2025 at the University of St. Michael's College in Toronto. This ubiquitous fact about the Irish before the famine is false. As a rare skeptic commented in 1887, even if an Irish laborer in Ireland could eat 12 pounds of potatoes in 24 hours, he would be, quote, mechanically incommoded by the volume. Now, for reference, it was well established among professional dealers in swine for the British market that the average Irish pig ate 12 pounds of potatoes each day and the average Irish cow nearly twice again as much. Over time, however, the idea of a daily diet of a dozen pounds of potatoes became an established historical.

fact repeated again and again in historical literature about the Irish worker and one that was embraced in folklore as well as in history books. So in the 1940s, when schoolchildren in Ireland collected stories from their elders and transcribe them, and these are all searchable online, in charming cursive, one man told a child that, quote, nine potatoes every person used to eat in the day, three at every meal. But folk tales are of course not reliable sources of statistics, and three and nine are powerfully symbolic numbers. Three is the Trinity. in Christianity, and nine is the triple of the triple in both Christianity and in pre-Christian Irish mythology. So these folk memories show that while these ostensible facts about the Irish

diet can't be literally true, they still express a kind of moral truth, which is that the Irish really did subsist on potatoes to a remarkable extent, remarkable even by the monotonous standards of 19th century laborers diets, with many Irish workers eating only potatoes and water, supplemented with a few other vegetables and condiments. Historians have been careless with this outlandish fact because it is such a useful symbolic quantity, because it's a useful and blunt way of conveying the depth of Ireland's dependence on the potato. But for the officials, politicians, and writers who repeated the claim throughout the 19th century, the idea of a heroic Irish appetite for potatoes shows, I think, a colonial understanding of Ireland

that thrived in Britain even during the era of the United Kingdom. A freakish stomach for potatoes helped to explain why the supposedly irresistible, and improving gravity of the free market did not seem to act on Ireland and exonerated Britain of its pivotal role in Ireland's hungry seasons and hungry years. Okay, could you do one of those ideas standards? I'm Padrick Scanlan.

Sure, yeah, I'm Padraig Scanlan. I'm an associate professor at the University of Toronto in the Center for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, and I'm the author of Rot, an imperial history of the Irish famine. Perfect. In January 2026, Ideas producer Sean Foley sat down with Padrick Scanlan in our Toronto studio.

So maybe we'll begin where your lecture begins, which is this idea of how many potatoes an Irishman could eat. You know, to this day, potatoes in the Irish are still linked to the point of stereotype. And indeed, you know, many of us do like potatoes. But there's nothing really ancient about the relationship between Ireland and the potato. Can you briefly give folks a sense of how the potato got to Ireland?

So, yeah, the potato is not native to Europe. It's native to the Americas, especially to Central and South America. So it grows wild in parts of Mexico. It grows wild in parts of Peru. It's also widely cultivated in those places, but it also grows. You can find wild potatoes there. And so the potato is part of a whole group of plants and animals that across the Atlantic back from the Americas to Europe after the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas.

So historians sometimes call that the Colombian exchange. And so the potato arrived in Ireland in the 15th century or in the 16th century. I think the consensus has sort of settled now on the idea that it was Basque fishermen, bringing the potato, which they kept as food on board their ships, stopping in Ireland for food and water on their way to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland to fish for cod. Right. And sort of at the outset of globalized trade, I guess you could say, really. Yeah. In Ireland, the potato was initially a really useful crop for people who needed a more secure food when, say, the oats harvest failed or when an epidemic killed cattle or pigs, right? The potato served initially as a backstop. But then through the course,

of the 17th and 18th centuries, the potato stopped being a backstop in Ireland and became a staple. And then it became a staple on which people depended more than they depended on it anywhere else in Europe. You make a very important distinction right off the top between the blight and famine. Would you be able to just kind of unpack that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, the biological arrival of the blight was different from the famine because the blight killed potatoes everywhere in Western Europe. It killed potatoes everywhere in the Americas. But it was only in Ireland that that biological event created a humanitarian disaster that was so profound and so long lasting that it permanently changed the political and economic and cultural history of the place

where it struck. It was the features of the Irish economy. Like that's really what the rot of the title refers to, right? It's the structures that had been built up over centuries placing Ireland within the United Kingdom and within the empire and placing the Irish poor in particular in a uniquely fragile and precarious position that made the biological event of the blight into the social, economic, ecological, cultural catastrophe of the famine. And there are different things. I'd like to have you read just the first two paragraphs of the book. Yeah, sure, I can. I'll read it. Richard Webb was rector of Kara, a village and county cork. In February 1847, he asked two men he trusted to visit the homes of the poorest families in his parish.

It was the second year of famine in Ireland. The potato crop had failed in 1845 and again in 1846. Authorities in Dublin and London, however, believe that the Irish poor might be feigning destitution. As Webb's men made their rounds, farmers told them to avoid a knot of houses at the edge of a certain field. They were typical Irish cottages, draughty and damp without windows or chimneys,

little more than dirt floor rooms with slimy stone walls and thatcher. roofs. Those houses are cursed, the farmers warned. The man Webb had sent heated the warning. There was enough misery in the village and the surrounding countryside to prove that the Irish poor were not dissembling and that many really were starving to death. But Webb was curious. He prevailed on another member of his congregation to go back to the cursed cottages and make a report. In a cabbage garden nearby, the man found the corpses of a woman named Kate Barry and two of her children half buried in loose soil. Dogs had dug up Barry's head and legs, ripped the flesh off the skull, and nod and crack the long bones. Barry's scalp,

with her hair attached, was close by. The man at first mistook it for a horse's tail. In the two small cottages about 30 yards farther from the garden were four more bodies. Those of two adults, Norriegian and Tom Barry, and two children, Nellie Barry and Charles McCarthy. Their corpses had been decomposing for two weeks. Another man, Tim Donovan, had died a few days earlier. His wife and sister, ill with typhus did not have the strength to move the body or the money to bury it. I need make no comment on this, Webb wrote, but ask, are we living in a portion of the United Kingdom? On the eve of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1851, 52, the population of Ireland was more than 8 million people. The Irish comprised more than 30% of the population of the United Kingdom.

During the famine, at least 1 million people died and roughly 2.5 million people emigrated. If the Irish rural poor had been impelled to poverty by their appetite for potatoes, then what politicians often called the Irish question was easier to answer. An absurd conception of Irish appetites made it easier to explain Ireland's hunger both before and during the famine because of biology rather than the corrosive effects of colonialism. British political economists blamed Ireland's poverty on Ireland's backwardness, on the refusal of the Irish poor to adapt to capitalist modernity. In 1844, the influential economist Nassau William Sr.

wrote in the Edinburgh Review that Ireland, quote, has been the most painful subject on which a liberal writer could ever employ himself, characterized by a state of society in which all the means of good are turned to evil, in which a fertile soil and a temperate climate have produced a population in want of all decencies. Seniors abuse suggests why so many were ready to believe that the Irish ate a daily helping of potatoes almost too large for the average human stomach to bear. The Irish people were hyper-dependent on potatoes because the tubers were easy to grow

and could satisfy an astounding hunger. Now, at the same time as the Irish appetite became an object of awe, similar claims about the appetites how other colonized people around the world went into common currency. For example, the French agronomist and chemist, Jean-Baptis Bousséééé, in a standard textbook of organic chemistry

published in 1844 and widely translated across Europe, quoted in a French official in colonized ponderciary, writing, it is requisite to have seen the Indians at their meals to have any idea of the enormous quantity of rice they will put into their stomachs. No European could cram so much at a time. Now, the editor and translator of an American edition of this textbook published in 1845 added, in a footnote, the Irish peasantry, who lives so much on potatoes, will consume 14 pounds per DM, exclamation mark.

Two exclamation marks, actually. So this false but meaningful fact about the Irish was already in transnational circulation by 1845. And adding to this grotesque natural history of the Irish laborer was another myth of a specific variety of potato widely eaten by the Irish poor. This potato had a name so weird and yet appropriate, especially given British attitudes toward the Irish, that you couldn't make it up. It was called the Lumpur. Cut at this point in his lecture to Padraig Scanlan showing a slide featuring a swishly bagged and branded batch of lumpers all set for high-end grocery retail. But back in the mid-19th century, the lumpers' reputation was anything but glamorous.

The lumper had heightened both anxiety among British politicians about the precariousness of the potato and reinforced the idea of Irish eating habits as excessive an animal. One official working in Ireland described the lumper as of a soft water equality, unwholesome and unpalatable. The lumper, another wrote, was barely human food at all. Mix them up with any kind of potatoes and lay them before a pig, and she won't eat one of them until the good kind are devoured. The lumper was reputed to yield as much as 30% more per harvest than other commonly grown cultivars like the cup and the apple, which by the 1840s were usually sold to the middle-class Irish market. According to a royal commission, the lumpers' cheapness and large size had led to its widespread

throughout the country. Now, unlike Irish stomach capacity, the lumper was not a legend, although its terrible taste seems to have been exaggerated to emphasize the poverty and the degradation of the people who ate it while selling their higher value crops. In fact, I think the idea that the highest yield potato was the least tasty seems to have been as cyclical as potato yields themselves. In 1808, one writer mentioned. many varieties that were growing in County Clare, including the apples, blacks, cups, leather coats,

grenadiers, and lumpers, among others. Now, at the time, this is just in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, the cup was the highest yield variety in circulation in Ireland, believed to be, quote, not only more productive, but vastly more nutritive, although more difficult of digestion. That is to say, another widely available potato that didn't seem to taste as good as the potatoes that were for sale on the middle-class market. On the eve of the famine, the lumper was in decline. As the botanist David Ferguson noted in 1853, the potato, like the tree and the hen, becomes aged and past bearing. Most cultivated potatoes, to this day are clones. If you want to grow a potato, the eyes of seed potatoes are cut out and planted in the earth, and this set planting increases yields and ensures a reliable

and often substantial crop from each set of sets. However, planting in sets produces crops with less genetic diversity that are more vulnerable to pests and to pathogens. Without pesticides and without the modern cold chain, protecting the potato crop, yields begin to fall after a few generations of planting in a very predictable cycle. In fact, as early as 1834, Irish agricultural magazines were sounding alarms

that the lumper was, at least in some fields, now barely producing more than the last. the small pieces that had been sewn in the ground. And so although the lumper was nothing special, a part of a cycle of potato varieties shaped by yield, it too has become a symbol of Ireland's strangeness on the eve of the famine. Like the idea of Patty tucking into a mountain of spuds, it has proved to be an irresistible detail for historians that the Irish starve because the lumpers failed. In fact, I've found references to this nearly as often as I found references to 14-pound helpings of potatoes in the literature. This potato that the Irish poor and

hailed and that their pigs rejected, made it, I would say, easier for Britons to imagine that Irish labor had in effect co-evolved with the potato to the point where Irish workers could eat potatoes in quantities impossible for an Englishman. As the lead bureaucrat at the Treasury responsible for famine relief, Charles Trevelyan wrote, the potato allowed the Irish to seek the greatest description of food at the smallest expense of labor. Many, including Trevelyan, feared that the system was unsustainable, but at the same time it had become essential to British productivity. And by this measure, then, the famine was an active God that might wipe the slate clean. I mean, I read a lot of this and received this lecture really from the perspective in a sense of like a rooted Christian faith that did not appear to be present in a lot of the response.

You, we talk about the, is it Elise. This is a really hard one for me to pronounce. Elamacinari relief. Elamacinary relief. Yeah. You couldn't just practice unbridled institutional charity when you're literally watching people starving to death. Yeah. They had to do something for it or else it would corrupt them.

That's right. I don't remember that being in the Gospels. Yeah. But to what degree do you think that all of these different things that happen to create the famine, to what degree could it be said? to be a spiritual crisis? That's a good question. There are features of, or there were features of the particular strands of Anglicanism and evangelical Anglicanism that animated the British government in this era that made

institutional relief seem counterproductive both to faith and to practical governance. A kind of good illustrative example is to think about the famous British abolitionist William Wilberforce and why exactly he opposed slavery, right? So Wilberforce opposed the slave trade and he was very much in favor of the abolition of slavery itself. But he was willing to countenance the idea that ending slavery could take years or decades. And partly that's because Wilberforce saw. the abolition of slavery as an opportunity to at least offer enslaved people or formerly enslaved people the opportunity to convert to Christianity. And for him, that moment of conversion and of atonement was a much more theologically and spiritually significant moment than anything that happened

on earth. So people should accept their position within the social order because the amount of time that people spend on earth is infinitely small in comparison. to what happens after. And so it's a kind of vision of radical spiritual equality that is still very much in support of sometimes radical material inequality. And that's not to say that any of these people or indeed any of the people who administered Irish relief weren't sensitive to and sympathetic to individual people. But on a kind of wider scale, they were willing to see the crisis unfolding in Ireland as part of some kind of divine plan for the Reformation of Irish society. You know, one of the key figures in the Irish famine and relief for the Irish famine,

a man named Charles Trevelyan, Trevelyne was a brilliant, brilliant writer. And he wrote, while the famine was ongoing, he wrote a book called The Irish Crisis. It was published in 1848, and it was published in support of John Russell's government to kind of declare the famine over, even though the famine was. still ongoing. I think I think about it anachronistically as like George W. Bush on the aircraft carrier with mission accomplished behind him. Right. Yeah, that just popped right into my head. Yeah. And, you know, it was mission accomplished and Trevelyan asks in the book, what hope is there for a nation that lives on potatoes? He was not unsympathetic to the plight of

individual suffering Irish people, but at the same time, he was not necessarily unhappy with the possibility that the potato could be uprooted from the Irish economy. and that Ireland could move forward into civilization and to modernity. And one of the points I try to make in Rod is that that completely misunderstands what was actually happening in the Irish countryside, and that the Irish countryside wasn't insulated from the modernizing forces of British capitalism and British imperialism. It just looked old. And that aesthetic illusion made it really easy to imagine that it was old. But in fact, Irish rural laborers lived very much in the winds.

of British industrial capitalism. Many British observers went to Ireland and saw the past, a way of life preserved. Troves of butter that have been found in Ireland's bogs when I think is 3,000 years old. And amateur archaeologists and Irish landowners digging in their bogs on the eve of the famine found all sorts of things buried in the acidic muck and tended to interpret those finds as even in the distant past, evidence of Irish backwardness. So for example, when one landowner discovered a human corpse wearing tanned leather, obviously from the Iron Age,

and it's a shame right, this was in the early 19th century. So as soon as the body touched oxygen, it started to deliquesqueath. So there's no evidence to check these references. But whoever saw it noted that the corpse was wearing tan leather and therefore had to be an ancient Britain rather than an ancient Celt. Because in the Iron Age, Britain, even then was sort of chronologically and civil. civilizationally advanced and a kelp would have worn untanned leather. So what people found in the bogs was a very powerful metaphor for what people thought they saw in the Irish countryside. And archaeological finds like this were often taking, as I would say, as evidence of a static,

ancient Irish way of life, right? The Irish are making butter in 1845, and here is butter from 2,000 years ago found in an Irish bog. But a German visitor to Ireland, I think, saw the scene much more clearly. He had seen peasants in the Baltic who lived in deep poverty, but seemed to him at least to have preserved ancient customs, national dress, particular forms of housing. In Ireland, he observed, there nowhere exists an old, fixed form of anything. So the Irish, I would argue, and this is the central argument of my book, were not estranged from the market. They lived in its teeth. And the potato, far from protecting Irish laborers, expose them to all of the risks and pitfalls of capitalist modernity and the British economy. As one Irish nationalist

wrote after the famine, the potato was our sole and only capital. Padrick Scanlan, author of Wrought, an imperial history of the Irish famine. He spoke in October 2025 at the University of St. Michael's College as part of their Celtic Studies speaker series. And Ideas was there. Ideas is here too on CBC Radio 1, CBC.C.C.C.C.a and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Specksavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night

drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.ca.caps are provided by independent optometrists. prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.ca to learn more.

The Alto High Speed Rail Project is on track. Expected travel time from Toronto to Montreal, three hours. Next stop, public consultations in your community. Make your voice heard. Visit altotrain.ca for more information. By the time of the famine, Ireland was fully integrated into the British economy, vulnerable to the rise and fall of world commodity markets and the industrial business cycle. The potato then was not ancient. It was modern. as producer, Sean Foley, was there at Padraig Scanlan's lecture and spoke with him in our Toronto studio in January 2026.

You say in the lecture, the potato was not ancient, it was modern. And I love the sound of that sentence. I find modern such a broad term, and in some ways that's what makes it so useful. Could you go a little deeper on how you define modern in that statement? I think the first is that the potato is not ancient to Ireland at all. And the adoption of the potato as a hyper staple happens, I think, in the 18th century, in an era when Ireland is not formally part of the United Kingdom yet, nor is it formerly a colony of the British Empire, but it is still substantially subject to British colonial rule. And the shape that British colonialism takes in Ireland is partly a kind of, a kind of, cultural and legal anti-Catholicism. And it's also an ever-increasing squeeze on Irish land to produce more stuff and to produce more rent. And the potato makes that possible. It allows Irish laborers to be paid sometimes in land, sometimes in potatoes, which suppresses wages. And it allows Irish farms to produce more and more stuff without inputs really of technology or capital. And those forces make Ireland look all the fact.

But they are forces that are being set in motion by the increasing sophistication and globalization of the British economy. You know, the potato is not a symbol of Irish antiquity. It's a symbol of imperial modernity. It was almost like they were trying to do two completely contradictory things. On the one hand, to kind of fold Ireland into this modern economic system, but also to basically get something for nothing. like the structure of the rents, the payment, the suppression of wages that you talk about. It's like the British didn't invest in Ireland. I mean, I think the, I mean, one of the mysteries that, I mean, my whole career as an historian I've been trying to unpack is the origins of British faith in the market. Britons in the first half of the 19th century included some of the most passionate, like zealots in favor of the free market in the history.

in the history of ideas, in the English-speaking world, at least. And yet this was the era when there were the most market failures in the British Empire. But there really is a profound faith among a large number of very powerful people in Britain and the British Empire in the idea that markets have a natural logic. That natural logic is in some way connected to the logic of the unfolding of God's work in the world. although not every British political economist is also a theologian. There is a lot of overlap. And consequently, right when Ireland joined the United Kingdom in 1801,

dissolved its own parliament, was folded into the UK, a lot of advocates for the union on both sides of the border believe that there would be a kind of natural flow of capital and technology into Ireland and a flow of products and labor into Britain. But there wasn't really a specific plan, as far as I can tell, at least, for that to happen, right? It's not as though there was a capital investment plan that came along with the active union. It was just kind of assumed that, well, Ireland has undeveloped land and capital will naturally be attracted to it. And the exact opposite happens, right?

Ireland doesn't become a place where British capitalists invest. In fact, people with money in Ireland pull it out after the union because it's easier. Right. And so Ireland was not particularly industrially sophisticated before the active union, but afterward, you know, Ireland deindustrializes insofar as it's industrialized at all. And so the idea that the growth of an economy is natural is a really powerful one. And I think it animates the way that the British Empire sees everything. Now, to the question of civilization, which was a loaded yet fluid term in Britain in the 19th century, and seemed to permeate all aspects of life.

For instance, you really were what you ate. The political economist and writer Harriet Martineau was explicit in moralizing bread and moralizing wheat, to which she attributed profound civilizing properties. Wheat, she argued, took more effort to grow, which dispelled indolence. It could be stored as grain as insurance against future calamity, promoting prudence,

and when men, she wrote, have been taught to prefer wheat and bread, it is more likely that their children should be taught to seek butcher's meat than allowed to fall back on potatoes. So in the imaginary of British political economy in the 1830s, the potato represented a lack of civilization, a lack of modernity, and the complexity, and the division of labor required to produce bread made bread the kind of archetypally civilized and civilizing food stuff.

Potatoes could feed the multitude, but they were fickle and they were culturally suspect. Set planting, as we've seen, tended to this cycle of boom and bust. And people knew this in the 19th century. Although it produces from a given acreage more human food than any other crop, when agricultural writer commented, the potato is yet a most treacherous and perishable one. The potato, in other words, was precarious and was known to be so.

And the potato economy in Ireland had a regular rhythm. Laborers planted in the spring, took in the crop in October and November, and then stored the potatoes in pits, opening each pit as needed. If a laborer had enough land, they might also grow wheat or oats for sale to the many middlemen who also brokered rental agreements between landlords, smaller tenants, and nearly landless or entirely landless laborers. For Irish laborers dependent on potatoes alone, by the summer, most potatoes from the year's crop would be gone.

And at this time, many Irish men left for England to work on English farms. If there were not enough potatoes left in a family's pits, the women and children would live on the road in another part of the country, begging for donations of money or potatoes which were rather eaten or sold. As potatoes ran low, men would begin to ask for them boiled with a bone or moon in the middle. That is half-boil. If you ever fail to fully to cook a potato, you know what I'm talking about, with the heart or central nucleus of the potato parboiled, hard, and waxy. Laborers believe that this bone took longer to digest in the stomach, and therefore a half-cooked potato was effectively two meals in one. Many Irish laborers grew potatoes in what were called lazy

beds, which is still a kind of feature of the Irish rural landscape, the kind of gently undulating fields of green. Lazy bed cultivation in Ireland was usually done with six-foot-long spades that could be used without stooping. And it seemed backward, right? The name, like the lumper, was irresistible, an irresistible detail for critics. And so, in fact, was the long-handled spade because it prevented workers from stooping. It was considered to be perhaps morally hazardous for a people living on the edge of

civilization, because modern workers ought to stoop. But in any case, lazy bed agriculture was efficient in a low technology, low capital, rural economy. This concept of civilization is something that is ubiquitous in the history of the British Empire in the 19th century, but is not really defined. I think the closest, most stable definition of civilization that I've been able to formulate is the reproduction in a non-British middle class group of people, both in Britain and outside of Britain, of the values and idealized economic behaviors of the British middle class. So the British middle class don't necessarily save. They don't necessarily reinvest the money they save in good works and economically productive businesses. But the idealized British middle class person does, right?

They earn money. They don't spend it right away. They keep it. They save it. they build a kind of patrimony for their children. They are prudential always. They're pious. And that's an idealized vision.

But I think civilization, insofar as it has a stable definition, is often that. It's to what extent are people appearing to behave in the ways that the idealized British bourgeois behaves? Well, it's interesting, the economic identity that you just described. Like it's civilization as economic identity. identity. I mean, I'm hearing and seeing banking and investment commercials in my head while you're describing this idealized British middle class. Yeah. I mean, look, you can just see it in just the way that that morality sets the middle class apart from the poor and from the aristocracy. You know, it's a very powerful model of how you're supposed to behave. And it's one that is constantly being

applied everywhere around the world. Right. This is the key point is that whether it was the people of Ireland or the people of India, I imagine very few of them were behaving in that way. And even if they did, that usually wasn't enough, right? There's always something. And that's a little iffyer for the Irish, right? Because there are extraordinarily wealthy and powerful people of Irish descent and people born in Ireland in 19th century Britain.

And I think that complicates Ireland's relationship with the empire. It complicates Ireland's relationship with colonialism, that it's a place. that is subject to the forces of British colonial rule at home, but which supplies huge numbers of personnel for administering empire and for applying colonial rule outside of Ireland. You were close. There's that line. I don't remember if it was Trevelyan or in here you quote, we're too close to kind of fully colonize this island and yet they're too far from us for us to be one in a sense. Yeah, too close to, too similar and yet too different, too close and yet too far. People joked in the 19th century that it was a union that was never consummated, right? And that Ireland and Britain were married, but never consummated the marriage. And it didn't take long after the union for movements within Irish politics to coalesce around the idea of ending the union and restoring the Irish parliament, which it's worth noting is different from Irish republicanism.

The people who are advocating led by Daniel O'Connell, famous Irish patriot, for the end of the union, they're called repealers because they want to repeal the active union. And the repealers are not imagining an Irish republic. They are imagining an independent Irish parliament and an Irish society rededicated to a kind of like unworldly agrarian Catholicism. O'Connell is a spectacularly important figure in the history of Irish independence and Irish nationalism, but he is not a Republican. And so projecting back the later history of the Irish independence movement and the Irish struggle for independence from Britain and from the British Empire, projecting that back onto the famine without thinking about the way the famine shaped that history is a similar kind of move to thinking about how politics works now.

or how the British governance works now and projecting that backward. This was a very different way of governing. And so that colors how we ought to think about what happened in the famine and how Britain responded to it. So in a country of small plots and high rents, by the early 1840s at least, most farmers sold all their grain and sometimes part of their crop to meet their rent. One visitor heard reports of livestock bought as speculative investments for six or seven pounds and then sold back for half their value to cover rents,

or of oatmeal bought on credit for 20 shillings and then sold back to creditors for a third of the value. Farmers who were lucky enough to have cows would sell all of the butter and cream and sometimes keep the skim milk and buttermilk. As Nassau Senior wrote, Irish farmers met their rent by calculating how small a portion of his tenement devoted to the most abundant variety of the most abundant species of food will feed his family. But Irish laborers did whatever they could for cash. At one parliamentary hearing, a commentator remarked they are ready to grasp at anything that will enable them to earn a rent. penny, pulling gravel and lime and carrying turf to market. Strikingly, though, very little money exchanged hands in this economy.

And unlike in England, where landlords would lease the land to their tenants and then reckon any capital improvements in partnership with their tenants into the land, most land in Ireland was leased as what was called soil only. So in other words, if a tenant living on rented land happened to make improvements to the land, they were liable to pay an increase in rent. There was no partnership between landlord and tenant. It was like an antagonistic relationship. Consequently, to increase revenue without risking a hike in rent, many farmers subdivided and sub-lease their own land to poorer subtenants in order to make rent

and also to generate more rent upward for the ultimate landlord. Cotteriors, as they were called, rented small acreages from larger farmers and usually paid their rent in cash, growing crops from market. But below Cotter tenants were con acre tenants. Con acre tenants were the most dependent on the potato. and were in consequence the most vulnerable laborers in Ireland to changes in the price of commodities and to failures in the potato crop. So conacre was land, usually very little land, as little as a half acre of land, that was rented

for a single season, usually rented pre-fertilized, at a rent of about 10 pounds per acre for the best manured land, which is an eye-popping sum, right? This is a really substantial rate of rent for very poor land. Connaker landlords would pay their rented money, but because of their own poverty, they would collect rented labor or by claiming a portion of their tenants. crops. So rather than being like medieval peasants, conacre tenants were desperate speculators. If a tenant chose to give up his crop or her crop and keep their rent money, they were wagering that the price of potatoes in the market would be low enough to feed their family when rent was due. The Royal Commission

of 1835 found that in most cases, the average conacre crop produced about 10 shillings profit after calculating the cost of rent, seed, and labor, which is a tiny profit, half a pound, eeked out on a razor thin margin. So a bad year, would, which is a bad year, would mean near starvation and an inability to rent conacre for the next season. And in times of crop failure, the price of food would rise to over 40% over the usual market rate. So when prices rose, people lost their land. And if the potatoes were gone by May, the new crop wouldn't be dug until at least the middle of August. Every year then, many people in Ireland lived on the edge of starvation. Those who had to beg, left their homes and wandered where they wouldn't be recognized.

men would have their wives or children bring them empty plates in the fields and feign eating to avoid being seen to have nothing to eat. Beggers would empty their pockets and potato sacks if asked. At night, though, people regularly stole potatoes from the fields or from their neighbor's stores. They would send their children secretly to milk or bleed cows. Charity and theft then, I think, were manifestations of the same phenomenon by day and by night. Rather than filling bellies, potato dependence emptied them. Ireland's placed then in the British imperial economy and within the Union left millions brutally exposed to market forces, to low wages, to high rents and to corrosive and predatory credit. As the American abolitionist and humanitarian Asanath Nicholson wrote, a famine was always in Ireland to a certain degree. It's like a dizzying and dense land situation. These days, in economic terms, we talk about, sometimes we talk about a release valve, you know, in undesirable. economic situations or difficult economic situations. Was there no release valve at all in this case? Or was market economics not evolved enough to even? No, I mean, the only release traditionally

in the Irish economy was emigration. And that Irish immigration did not begin with the famine. A new wave of Irish immigration was unleashed by the famine, the largest and most significant. But yeah, I think I think the solution to emiseration in Ireland was emigration. Just get people off the land. Yeah, or just either or voluntarily leave the land, right? Yeah. When it became kind of leave or die for some people. Yeah, but you can kind of see the patterns of Irish immigration shifting over centuries.

You know, I think something like almost 20% of the non-inslave population of the United States at independence was of Irish extraction, right, or possibly born in Ireland. I don't want to misquote the statistic. But those were primarily people from the north, right? So it was, and those were people who were going in pursuit of land, in pursuit of opportunity. And the immigration that began with the famine, especially the immigration during the famine, was out of desperation. But those people who survived, who survived that initial wave of panicked emigration during the famine were the basis for an even larger wave of emigration in the 1850s, 1860s, all the way up until I think the

1940s, right? The population of Ireland continued to fall. And it's still substantially smaller in 2026 than it was in 1845. Marginally more fortunate Irish laborers were joined in their predicament by a strange companion, one with an equally strange combination of qualities. Intelligent, tasty, large, lucrative, and occasionally vicious, the pig. The lowly pig actually enjoyed something of a heyday in early 19th century Ireland and eventually became quite literally an asset at a time when assets were rare in the Irish countryside. Now the pigs, the pigs that turned up their snouts at Irish lumpers were another biological pillar of the potato system.

Pigs could pay the rent, and although Irish peasants had kept pigs throughout the 18th century, the union moved Irish pigs into the imperial marketplace. So in 1801, Ireland exported about 2,000 pigs to Britain, but by 1837, the number was 700,000. The pigs, as we have seen, eight potatoes, whatever scraps were left and more. But unlike the Irish poor, who in their numbers, and in their poverty caused land to be subdivided that should have been consolidated, pigs were cheap and pigs were profitable. The small cost at which these animals can be reared, one breeder wrote in 1847,

and their fecundity and their wonderful powers of thriving under disadvantages, render them an actual blessing. Pigs also were purchased on credit, but they were a more reliable bet than potatoes, a kind of fail-safe against eviction due to unpaid rent. So here's another joke, then, that can also be a historical question. an Irishman is asked, why do you let your pig eat at the table with you? And he says, well, he pays the rent.

And in Britain, then, Patty and his pig were stock characters. And these are not just British jokes at the expense of Ireland, right? The Irish did joke about the pigs that paid their rent. But the jokes, you know, which seemed blithe and lighthearted to British readers, who were eager, I think, to see the Irish as jolly, earthy and uncivilized, where I think more like cynical gallows humor. The Irish poor needed pigs to survive. And they needed, moreover, to live in very close proximity to them, much closer proximity than English laborers.

They did that because they had to. Now, pigs are powerful animals. They're intelligent omnivores, and they're happy to eat flesh when they can find it. So for Irish children who in the British imaginary rolled around like family pigs, like little piglets themselves, family pigs must have been terrifying. And indeed, in reformist tracks that were aimed specifically at the Irish poor, parents were often warned never to leave their children alone with pigs, and especially with sow's nursing piglets.

One toddler whose father fell asleep was playing with the litter of pigs and woke up to see, quote, the poor little thing all in a gore of blood and its face so eat by the nasty sow that the life was out of it. Pigkeeping was common in England as well. For poor laborers, a cottage pig could dispose of waste by eating it and then be fattened either for sale or for consumption. There were in fact about a million cottage pigs in England in the later Victorian era. And so although virtually every English agricultural laboring family had a pig, it was the Irish pig that became a symbol of backwardness that might spread and conceivably infect England. When Thomas Carlyle visited Ireland during the famine, he was sad to see human swinery has here reached its acme. So this was the potato economy before the famine. The potato exposed Irish workers to the risks of a global market

and thrust Ireland into an imperial capitalist modernity. As a symbol, though, potatoes and pigs made the Irish strange, the owners of piggish appetites and piggish palates. In the 18th century, the potato was, at least for some agronomists and political economists, a symbol of progress. But on the eve of the potato famine, it was a symbol of futility and backwardness. And so when the late blight finally struck in 1845 and the government of the United Kingdom predicted that it would strike, many Britons, and I think many wealthy Irish too were horrified, but they were also prepared to see in the tragedy an opportunity to bring Ireland at last into the disinfecting sunlight of modern capitalism. Thank you.

So this, and I've enjoyed the book, it's been difficult for me to read it. I need to take a little at a time as a person of Irish descent, I think. And you also have some Irish background. At what point did the impact of immersing yourself in the famine strike you most deeply in an emotional sense? The stuff that was most affecting, I think, in the famine is the way that, the conditions of starvation and the conditions of epidemic disease started to pull apart the fabric of everyday life in Ireland, right? Where, you know, parents would abandon their children, children would abandon their parents. But, like, it turns out that, like, starvation does things to people's very basic senses of who they are and how they relate to the people around them.

It brings home the idea that, you know, the things that you think are, maybe foundational to your sense of yourself and who you are, are maybe more contingent than you think on having the basic necessities of everyday life. You ended the lecture with that image of the disinfecting sunlight of modern capitalism. Yeah. And I detected your tongue planted in cheek there at the end. A little bit. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's not, you know, I'm deeply skeptical of the idea of the market. as a natural thing. You know, and I think that attempts to conceive of what's a deeply human and often profoundly idiosyncratic and culturally and historically specific institution, the market as something that's transhistorical and natural is a huge misunderstanding of what people are and what markets are and what markets can do. Because as I try to argue in rot, it was the application of. market forces to Ireland that produced the conditions that made the famine possible. And then

when the famine did strike, the solutions that the British government applied were, in effect, as I see it at least, the forceful application of precisely the same ideas that had caused, that had made famine possible in the first place. Not to be too casual about it, but it's like they booted it. Yeah. Like they screwed it up. Yeah. I mean, or the, and they couldn't have done it otherwise, right?

You know, there's a moment where Daniel O'Connell and his friends propose a plan for the relief of the Irish poor that looks a lot more like what we might imagine in the present might be a plausible plan or one that sounds, it seems immediately appealing, where they say, let's close the ports and we'll get rid of temporarily suspend all trading regulations so that grain can flow into Ireland, but we'll also close the ports. so that the Irish can buy the stuff they produce or will distribute it for free. But Daniel O'Connell was so far away from being in a position to introduce any of those plans, that in effect they were kind of rhetorical advertisement for repeal aimed at the kind of people who were wealthy enough to be in the electorate in the first place, right? It was not, that was not a realistic plan for the relief of Ireland without a revolutionary change of government in England. One of the things that I try to focus on in my work is to try to show, it's not meant

to be like politically paralyzing and to forestall reform or activism in the present. But it's just meant to show that like activism and history are different things. And hoping that the people in the past will behave in the way that we would like them to is only going to result in frustration or it's going to result in massive distortion of the historical record. I take in this a reading challenge, which is I think I can approach the text in a different spirit now that we've had a conversation. So I look forward to maybe carrying this knowledge of the famine in a more, just in a thoughtful way that acknowledges what happened

and maybe be grateful for the insight that your work is providing. So thank you so much. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Padrick X. Scanlan, author of Rott, an imperial history of the Irish famine, and Associate Professor at the Center for Diaspora and Treaspera and transnational studies at the University of Toronto. He was in conversation with Ideas producer Sean Foley.

Patrick Scanlan's lecture was part of the Celtic Studies speaker series at the University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto. Technical production by Emily Kiervezio and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.