The potato blight visited all of Europe, but only in Ireland did it produce a catastrophe. Elsewhere, people could turn to other staple foods when a crop failed, but Ireland’s poor, subsisting on potatoes and exiled from the cash economy, had no alternative. As is often the case in times of starvation, the problem was not quite so simple as a shortage of food. At the height of the famine, Ireland’s docks were heaped with sacks of corn destined for export to England. But the corn was a commodity, determined to follow the money; since the potato eaters had no money to pay for corn, it sailed for
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