Rot - Padraic X. Scanlan

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 - one of the twelve 'most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books'.

'A vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine . . . Richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship.' Fintan O'Toole

'A vivid, polemical narrative that does justice to victims and explains the ideologies that worsened the disaster.' Irish Independent

'Scanlan's history of the ''Great Hunger' and its repercussions is meticulous, measured and damning.' Financial Times

'Mr. Scanlan's haunting and terrible book is undoubtedly a history title of the year.' Wall Street Journal

In the 1800s, 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. Ireland was
a laboratory for empire, shaping
British ideas about colonisation,
population, ecology and work.

In Rot, Padraic Scanlan reinterprets
the history of this time and the result
is a revelatory account of Ireland's Great Famine. 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 among the Irish. However,
Ireland before the famine more closely
resembled capitalism's future than
its past. While poverty before and
during the Great Famine was often
blamed on Irish backwardness, it did
in fact stem from the British Empire's
embrace of modern capitalism.

Uncovering the disaster's roots
in Britain's deep imperial faith
in markets and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the
Famine and its tragic legacy.