As the death toll soared, Ireland seemed remote, an isolated hell. And yet the Great Famine was a British, as well as an Irish, crisis. Ireland had, after all, been under sometimes notional English dominion since the Middle Ages. It had been conquered in the 17th century, invaded by Oliver Cromwell’s forces during the Civil Wars, and then, once more, by William III’s armies after the Glorious Revolution. During the 18th century, restrictions on trade subordinated Ireland’s economy to Britain’s. The Irish Catholic majority were dispossessed and barred from public life. After the rebellion of the United Irish against British rule in 1798, the 1800–01 Acts of Union combined Ireland and Britain into a new United Kingdom.
Britain and Ireland were now more closely intertwined than ever. The union had one currency and an integrated economy. Ireland sent 100 MPs to Westminster. By 1845, nearly a third of the population of the UK lived in Ireland. But when famine struck, the gulf within the union seemed unbridgeable. John Russell, prime minister at the height of the crisis, implied that Ireland and Britain, though geographically close, were distant in time. Ireland, he told the House of Commons, suffered
under “a famine of the 13th century acting upon the population of the 19th”.
A nation without hope
The Great Famine, however, was a modern famine, a political, ecological and economic disaster shaped by Ireland and Britain’s long history of suspicion and tense interdependence. Ireland was never a formal British colony, but its relationship to Britain was colonial. Britain extracted rent and agricultural products from Ireland. It sent Irish soldiers to fight for the empire abroad, while maintaining garrisons in Ireland to put down rebellion. ‘Paddy’, with his rundown home and dirty brood of children, his potatoes, pigs, lies and superstitions, was a stock figure in British popular culture.
‘Paddy’, with his potatoes, pigs and superstitions, was a stock figure in British popular culture
Many blamed the Irish for the catastrophe of the famine, drawing on these caricatures. Stone cottages, rooting pigs, potatoes stored in dirt pits, cold, acidic peatlands – the aesthetic of the Irish countryside was archaic and earthy, especially in comparison with Britain’s seething industrial cities. As Charles Trevelyan, the bureaucrat who organised famine relief, asked: “What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?”
The potato was not an ancient crop in Europe: it was introduced from the Americas by Iberian conquistadores in the 16th century. Yet there was a key distinction between Ireland and the rest of the continent in the way the crop was utilised. Across Europe, potatoes were embraced as a backstop against the failure of other crops. In Ireland, however, they quickly went from ‘famine food’ to staple.
During the 18th century, Irish land was subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels. As rents increased, farmers who might have eaten some of their oats or other crops sold them all, and fell back on potatoes for subsistence. Between 1741 and 1779 the number of Irish acres planted with potatoes was reported to have increased twentyfold. By 1845, on the eve of the famine, Ireland exported roughly 250,000 head of cattle, 90 million eggs and enough grain to feed 2 million people in Britain each year. But the Irish poor almost never ate anything but potatoes. “They are just as much fed on flour as they are clad in jewels and embroidery,” The Times commented.
Hyper-dependence on potatoes seemed to confirm British stereotypes about the Irish, as though Paddy had planted them to saunter and laze, to indulge in whiskey and blarney. But potatoes, although abundant in good years, are very vulnerable to disease. Some estimated that as much as one-fifth of the population lived on the edge of famine every season.
The Irish poor relied on complex credit arrangements, borrowing against their potato crops or trading labour for land, a cycle some called ‘working for the dead horse’. The Irish economy responded to world markets. “I do not know which is worse for the poor farmer: the fall or the rise,” a Roscommon labourer wondered. “When the market tumbles, where is the rent? And when the price gets up in a hurry, where is the food?”
Long before the famine, Ireland’s economy looked old but was perilously new; Ireland’s potatoes looked secure, but were precarious. And Britain was dazzled by what seemed to be the natural modernising power of the free market. The law of the market, described by the new discipline of political economy, seemed analogous to the natural laws of physics. Political economy, an Irish noble declared, was as certain as “the Newtonian philosophy”, rejected only by “the profoundly ignorant”.
If economies had natural laws, it followed that the best policy was ‘laissez-faire’, to let the market “bring things as nearly as possible to this their natural state”, as an official wrote. Laissez-faire, however, was hard work. It took a lot of regulation to make markets behave ‘naturally’. And so, even before the famine, British officials hoped to apply the pressures of market forces to reform Ireland. They could not see that those very forces – the demands of the British market, shaped by conquest and colonial exploitation – were what had made Ireland vulnerable.
Foul-smelling pulp
By the summer of 1845, Phytophthora infestans had crossed the Atlantic, probably among a shipment of fertiliser or seed potatoes bound for Belgium. The organism, a fungus-like ‘water mould’, was native to central Mexico, where potatoes grow wild. The ‘late blight’ caused by P infestans spread unchecked from Sweden to Spain, killing potatoes in the ground and turning stored potatoes into foul-smelling pulp. In the Netherlands, potato yields for 1845 fell by 71 per cent compared to previous averages; in Belgium, 87 per cent. The London newspapers reported on food riots in the Baltic and Poland, and on emergency restrictions of grain exports in the Ottoman empire.
British officials immediately recognised that the blight would be catastrophic in Ireland. But the idea that Ireland was backward, and that its backwardness was a consequence of an uncivilised indolence and comfort made possible by cheap potatoes, was too pervasive to overcome. It was crucial, by those lights, that all aid be conditional. Britain’s own Poor Law had a similar ethos. Recipients of relief in England were sent to workhouses, to deter all but the most desperate. In Ireland, this principle was stretched to absurd extremes.
In 1845, Robert Peel’s government met the first wave of the blight by importing 44 million pounds of American maize, sold at cost by local Relief Committees. Irish labourers who were unable to find work could apply for jobs at public works projects to earn money with which to buy the ‘Indian corn’. Maize was alien to the Irish – that was why Peel preferred it. Buying maize, he reasoned, would not disrupt the trade in wheat and oats, and would head off any restriction on the export of Irish crops.
Relief officers were warned never to give away food. As Trevelyan reminded his staff, “Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.” Officers were told to separate ‘normal’ hunger from hunger caused by the failure of the potato. Food riots and hunger-related disease increased. Ireland, however, had experienced potato failure before. Although 1845–46 was one of the worst subsistence crises in Ireland since the union, no one expected that the blight would return in 1846.
However, by midsummer, potatoes larger than a marble could hardly be found in Irish fields. In 1846, fewer potatoes were planted, and a greater proportion were destroyed. During the winter of 1846–47 – ‘Black 47’ – Irish society all but collapsed. An estimated 400,000 people died – thousands of starvation, and hundreds of thousands of diseases associated with hunger, especially typhus. People ate seaweed, grass, roots, carrion, dirt and the eggs of wild birds. As much as 3 per cent of the Irish population emigrated. Some ship captains offered free passage for the poor, as living ballast, as they were “cheaper to ship and unship… than… lime or shingle”. Still Ireland continued to export food – a basic principle of the relief programme. According to estimates, in 1846–47, some 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs. Waterford alone exported more than 20,200 barrels of wheat and nearly 59,000 barrels of oats from May 1846 to February 1847.
A moral hazard?
Peel’s government fell in the summer of 1846. The new prime minister, the Whig nobleman Lord John Russell, continued to adhere to the principle that the moral hazard of giving relief without expecting labour or money in exchange was as insidious as starvation. Where Peel had emphasised importing food for sale, Russell emphasised offering jobs at public works to allow the Irish poor to earn wages. Although food imports did increase, even many who could find work struggled to find food to buy. Ireland – especially the countryside – had very little infrastructure for selling imported food. “The ordinary mercantile machinery,” Trevelyan worried, “even of the greatest trading nation in the world, is unequal to such a novel emergency.”
Irish society all but collapsed. People ate seaweed, grass, roots, carrion, dirt and the eggs of wild birds
Thousands of public works opened, most of them offering make-work jobs, paying wages set by law at twopence less than the average local wage (a provision meant to encourage private employment, enforced in districts that had virtually no such work on offer). To many, relief work was nothing more than “digging holes and filling them up again”. A plan premised on the natural laws of the market required nearly 12,000 clerks and officers to administer. By March 1847, more than 700,000 people had jobs on the works.
Designed to save money, Russell’s public works cost more than £944,000 – about £102.4m today when adjusted for inflation. However, inflation is not always the most useful measure of the relative value of money over time. In 2022, a government project on a similar scale to the 1846–47 public works, in proportion to the gross domestic product of the present-day UK, would cost more than £3.83bn. The government’s tunnel vision, focused on checking ‘indolence’ and dependence among the desperate Irish, and on enforcing economy and austerity, proved expensive and wasteful.
Meanwhile, widely reprinted reports from places like Skibbereen inspired sympathy around the world. In January 1847, Queen Victoria wrote a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury asking for a collection in aid of famine victims. The letter, printed in The Times, opened a campaign that attracted hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations.
The charity was timely. Facing ballooning costs, and thrown off-balance in the spring of 1847 by a financial crisis, the Whig government quickly wound down the public works and sponsored a programme of local soup kitchens, financed directly by grants and donations. At their peak in the summer of 1847, the kitchens distributed daily rations to some 3 million people – all of whom were expected to prove that they had no other means of subsistence. The soup kept bellies full, but was not always nutritionally complete. Health officials recorded outbreaks of scurvy. “The feeding of dogs in a kennel was far more decent and orderly,” one observer wrote.
The soup kitchen programme was only ever intended to be temporary. As kitchens closed in the autumn of 1847, the Russell government devolved responsibility for famine relief onto Ireland’s Poor Law Unions, which had the power to levy taxes in order to pay for the relief of the local poor. This principle, that “Irish property should support Irish poverty”, might have functioned better in normal economic conditions. However, after nearly three years of famine, many unions quickly ran out of money. To deter applications to the unions and their workhouses, relief could only be given to people occupying a quarter-acre of land or less.
A month’s hard labour
Evictions, always a threat in rural Ireland, increased in number. Bailiffs tore the roofs off cottages and threw the residents into the fields. Magistrates could imprison people found outside of their ‘home’ union for up to a month’s hard labour. Irish society, the commissioners of the new system declared, could only be protected from “a state of almost universal pauperisation” by these rigid rules.
In the summer of 1848, a group of Irish nationalists, inspired by the revolutions sweeping continental Europe, attempted to overthrow British rule in Ireland. The ‘Young Ireland’ rebellion was swiftly crushed. Then, in autumn 1848, the blight returned. Following the rebellion, ‘laissez-faire’ turned vengeful. “The true thing to do,” Charles Wood, the chancellor of the Exchequer, told a colleague, is “to do nothing.”
In the poorest Irish counties, the winter of 1848–49 was as bad or worse than 1846–47. In County Clare, for example, the death rate kept rising from 1847 until early in 1850. By July 1849, about 1 million people depended either on the workhouse or outdoor relief given by workhouse staff. Although this was one-third of the number who had relied on soup kitchens two years earlier, the demand for relief in 1849 was regional, concentrated in the poorest counties in Ireland along the western coast and in the countryside of the south-west. Across Ireland, the cost of relief increased from £1.7m in 1848 to £2.2m in 1849. Even in 1850, when the situation had stabilised, some unions were still supporting one-third or more of the population in their districts.
By 1851, the ‘late blight’ that killed Irish potatoes had become endemic in Ireland. Irish potato crops remained susceptible to blight, but the disease spread less explosively. Meanwhile, mass death and mass emigration had – with brute force – somewhat reduced the pressure on Irish land.
The Great Famine was the worst humanitarian crisis to afflict the United Kingdom in the 19th century. It is the most important event in the history of the Irish diaspora. But the Great Famine was neither the first, nor the last, cataclysmic food shortage in the Victorian British empire. The Agra famine of 1837–38 in present-day Uttar Pradesh killed 800,000 people. Unstable climactic conditions generated droughts and famines in 1876–79, 1889–91 and 1896–1902 that killed at least 15 million in British India.
Crop failure was usually caused by natural phenomena – drought, heavy rains and population explosions of pests – but famine in the empire followed when imperial administrators placed their faith in the market to solve food shortages. There was almost always enough food. The obstacle was a stubborn insistence that private merchants deliver food to the hungry, and that the hungry pay for it, for their own good. The poverty of the imperial imagination made it impossible to imagine an alternative.
Padraic X Scanlan is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Rot: A History of the Irish Famine (Robinson, March 2025)
This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
