The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

This dependency on potatoes proved deadly when the potato blight hit in 1845. Over the next seven years 1 million people died – more than 10 per cent of the Irish population – in what became known as the Great Famine. What made this famine so appalling was that it was completely avoidable; it would never have happened if peasants had retained full rights to their ancestral land, where they would have had plenty of space to produce a diversity of crops. In other words, the scarcity that led to the famine was artificially created. But even with the new agrarian system in place, Ireland was still producing plenty of food, in aggregate; the problem was that it was all being siphoned away by the British. Ireland was exporting thirty to fifty shiploads of food to England and Scotland each day during the famine, while the local population starved to death.