“Political history, not natural history, turned a potato failure into a famine.”

Between 1845 and 1851, one million people on the island of Ireland died of famine-related causes. Another 1.5 million people emigrated.

On Free State today, historian Padraic X Scanlan, author of the outstanding history of the Famine, Rot, joins us to discuss what caused Ireland to suffer as it did.

He considers the main characters like Charles Treveleyan and the failure of an ideology that believed in the pure virtue of the market. “The blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields of vulnerable plants,” Scanlan writes. “But the famine—a complex ecological, economic, logistical, and political disaster—was a consequence of colonialism.”

Scanlan looks at how Ireland has dealt with the famine and how the potato itself became a symbol for those who blamed the Irish people themselves for the great hunger.

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