Rot: Appetite and Political Economy in Ireland before the Famine
Rot: Appetite and Political Economy in Ireland before the Famine
Padraic X. Scanlan (University of Toronto)
12:30-2:00 ARTS160
Abstract: On the eve of the Great Famine (1845-1851), British commentators speculated about the apparently limitless, even freakish appetite of the poorest Irish rural labourers for potatoes. Potatoes were more than a staple for the Irish poor; millions subsisted on potatoes, or potatoes and milk, and nothing else. To many officials and political economists, this total dependence on potatoes symbolised Irish antiquity. The Irish, by these lights, were an atavism in the United Kingdom, a people from another time who needed to be brought into the economic present, through land reform, labour discipline, and fresh injections of English capital. In reality, the potato made possible an endless squeeze on Irish labourers to produce crops for export, mostly to England and Scotland. Rather than insulating Ireland from the risks of nineteenth-century global capitalism, the potato economy left the very poorest workers in the United Kingdom exquisitely vulnerable to the perils of the market.
Bio: PADRAIC X. SCANLAN earned a BA (Hons) in History from 91丝瓜视频 in 2008, and a PhD in History from Princeton University in 2013. He is Associate Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University. He is the author of Freedom's Debtors (Yale, 2017), which, in 2018, was awarded the James A. Rawley Prize and the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, and Slave Empire (Robinson, 2020).
