Luke’s Reviews > Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine > Status Update

Political economy predicted that the poor would make the rational choice, choosing life over land, liberty, and family unity.

Enslaved workers in Alabama, "told of the distressed condition of the Irish poor," raised $50. The Choctaw Nation donated $710, roughly $20,440 in today's money.

When one officer gave away a few bags of meal, Trevelyan fired off a message to Randolph Routh, one of the commissaries-general leading the administration of the relief program, reminding him to keep his men in line. "Our plan," he wrote to Routh, "is, not to give the meal away, but to sell it." If the Irish came to depend on free corn, the plan would fail. In June 1846, a request to distribute food...

A priest in Kells, County Meath, estimated that one in twenty families would be out of potatoes by Christmas. And yet even as the crisis deepened, the priest noted, exports kept moving out of the country. He saw at least fifty dray carts full of grain on the road to Drogheda, "thence to feed the foreigner."

The potato could fail and collapse a family's prospects; a pig could kill a child, maim an adult, destroy a home. The Irish poor depended on both from necessity.

Experiments in austere political economy that would not be tolerated in England could be tried in the colonial world—even if the "colony" was a part of the United Kingdom.

"In the Victorian era, a very small number of people owned the United Kingdom. Just under four thousand people owned nearly 80 percent of Irish land, under two thousand owned 93 percent of Scotland, about five thousand owned more than half of England, and seven hundred held 60 percent of Wales." (for comparison purposes, the population of Britain rose from 13.9 million in 1831 to 32.5 million in 1901)

Lately it's the Troubles making the bestseller lists, but what I want to know is whether the century prior laid the scene with a genocide.