‘Rot: The Irish Appetite and the Great Hunger’

In the next installment in the Celtic Speaker Series, Dr. Padraic X. Scanlan, Associate Professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto, will present on the topic of ‘The Irish Appetite and the Great Hunger’ which he explores in his book, Rot.

On the eve of the Great Famine (1845-1851), British commentators speculated about the apparently limitless, even freakish appetites of the poorest Irish rural labourers for potatoes. Potatoes were more than a staple for the Irish poor; millions subsisted on potatoes, and virtually nothing else. To many officials and political economists, this total dependence on potatoes symbolised Ireland’s antiquity. The Irish, by these lights, were an atavism in the modern United Kingdom, a people from another time who needed to be brought into the economic present, through land reform, labour discipline, and the dynamic energy 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.