Starvation as a Tool of Empire
Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
By John Foster
According to Padraic X. Scanlan, one of the most horrific events in Irish history is due to imperialism.
Whereas many historical treatments of the Great Famine (1845–1852) have centred on ecological misfortune, administrative misjudgment, or tragic inevitability, Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine argues that these accounts obscure the systematised violence of British rule.
Rot couples a materialist account with nuanced attention to contingency and agency, offering a welcome corrective to earlier accounts and a fertile ground for further debate.
Scanlan contends that the famine must be understood not simply as a humanitarian disaster, but as an imperial event — shaped, amplified, and ultimately sustained by the capitalist and colonial logics of the British state.
Rot begins by displacing the potato blight from the centre of famine historiography. The blight may have been a biological trigger, Scanalan contends, but not a sufficient cause. Crop failure was common across Europe during the mid-nineteenth century. Only in Ireland did it coincide with mass death.
To understand why, we must turn not to fungus or weather, but to the structures of imperial British capitalism.
Ireland, Scanlan explains, was not a neglected periphery but a central testing ground for imperial ideas about race, labour, economics, and governance. The famine was thus not an aberration but a revelation — an imperial event that revealed the British Empire’s ideological core.
Drawing on a wide array of sources — from parliamentary records and Poor Law reports to diaries, newspaper articles, and bureaucratic memoranda — Rot reconstructs the intellectual architecture that enabled famine to be seen as a legitimate outcome of “progress.” British officials did not so much “fail” to act as refuse to alter the market-based principles that structured their understanding of governance.
For many, famine was a form of moral pedagogy. Hunger would teach the Irish industriousness. Evictions and emigration were painful, yes, but necessary culls in the name of improvement. The poor were not to be fed, but transformed. And if they could not be transformed, they were to be removed.
This argument rests on a structural understanding of class and state. The British government functioned as an instrument of the landed and commercial bourgeoisie. Landlordism in Ireland, primarily controlled by absentee British owners, operated through extractive rent-seeking and violently enforced enclosure.
Throughout the famine, food continued to be exported from Ireland, not solely due to malevolence, but because property rights prevailed. As Scanlan trenchantly observes, “rot” didn’t just describe the decay of potatoes but also of a political economy in which markets mattered more than mortality.
The book’s most original contribution is its analysis of the ideological work performed by imperial discourse, situating the famine in relation to “liberal imperialism,” a political ideology that fused laissez-faire economics with civilisational hierarchy.
In this vision, British rule represented tutelage rather than exploitation. Ireland was backwards, disordered, and inefficient; British governance promised modernisation and progress.
When famine struck, this ideology provided the scaffolding for inaction. Relief efforts had to be “moral.” Aid could not create dependency. Only those deemed “deserving” — those who worked or entered the poorhouse — were worthy of being saved.
Such reasoning, Scanlan argues, was not unique to Ireland. Instead, it paralleled the British Empire’s practices in India, the Caribbean, and Africa. The famine became a template for colonial administration elsewhere: a demonstration of how hunger could be managed, justified, and instrumentalised. The empire, in this telling, was not indifferent to suffering — it was predicated on a racialised and classist understanding of who was allowed to suffer, and why.
This attention to ideology is crucial. Too often, orthodox materialist readings neglect the role of ideas, language, and moral economy in shaping the reproduction of capitalist relations. Scanlan’s emphasis on “liberal imperialism” echoes the work of theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas, who emphasised the interplay between coercion and consent, economics and legitimacy.
The famine was not simply tolerated, but rationalised. It was a “natural” event that confirmed elite prejudices and justified further domination. In this way, Rot reveals how ideology functions as both a mask and a mechanism of structural violence.
Throughout the book, Scanlan returns to the question of narrative. Who told the story of the famine? How was suffering described, and to what end? He is deeply critical of liberal observers who registered the horror of the famine but remained within the ideological coordinates of the empire.
British travellers and reformers often wrote of “degraded” Irish peasants — gaunt, idle, childlike. Even those who sympathised with their plight reproduced the language of racial deficiency. The famine, Scanlan argues, was not simply documented; it was aestheticised and distanced. A culture of moral spectatorship displaced responsibility.
This critique resonates strongly with Marxist concerns about ideology, spectacle, and alienation. Human suffering, in Scanlan’s account, becomes raw material for the liberal conscience. Yet that conscience never rises to the level of solidarity.
Here again, Rot’s critique of liberalism is incisive but measured.
Scanlan does not accuse individuals of hypocrisy, nor does he deny the sincerity of outrage. Rather, he demonstrates how liberal moralism cannot overcome its inherent structural limitations. The sanctity of property, the belief in markets, and the racial hierarchies of empire all constrained what liberal actors could imagine, let alone enact.
One area where Rot may leave readers wanting more is in its treatment of resistance. While the book does an excellent job of dissecting imperial structures and logics, its focus on state policy and elite discourse sometimes marginalises the agency of the oppressed.
There are moments where tenant protests, food riots, and local forms of mutual aid are mentioned, but they remain secondary to the imperial frame. One is left wondering: what forms of counter-power emerged during the famine? How did Irish peasants interpret their suffering, and how did they act upon it?
To be fair, this omission reflects the broader archival bias of the period. The voices of the famine dead are largely absent from the record. Still, a history from below would be able to emphasise that resistance is not only armed rebellion but also everyday acts of refusal, adaptation, and solidarity. By leaving these dimensions out of the story it tells, Rot risks reinforcing a narrative of victimhood that, while politically sympathetic, downplays the dialectical nature of historical change.
Scanlan also gestures toward a broader ecological critique, suggesting that the famine must be understood as both an environmental and a political event. British agrarian capitalism, he notes, had created an extraordinarily brittle system in Ireland: monoculture, overpopulation in subsistence farming regions, and overreliance on a single crop.
When the potato blight arrived, it exposed not just biological vulnerability but economic recklessness. Capitalism, in this sense, was not simply indifferent to nature — it was ecologically destructive.
Although this ecological angle to Rot is only briefly developed, it holds promise. From a Marxist ecological perspective, as in the work of Jason W. Moore or Andreas Malm, capitalism does not operate outside of nature but through it, transforming ecological relations into profit-generating systems.
The Irish countryside, remade by enclosure and export-oriented agriculture, became a site of metabolic rift. There was a disjunction between human needs and capitalist imperatives. Scanlan’s attention to this dynamic opens space for connecting the famine to broader debates about extractivism, environmental justice, and the legacy of imperial ecologies.
Padraic Scanlan’s Rot is a powerful and unsettling book — one that demands that we rethink not just the Irish famine but imperialism as a global system of organised abandonment. It offers a persuasive demonstration of how state power, capitalist economics, and imperial ideology converged to produce one of the nineteenth century’s greatest atrocities.
This is not a “neutral” account, nor does it pretend to be. Rather, Scanlan writes with moral clarity and analytical precision, drawing the reader’s attention to how history is not merely what happened, but what was permitted, rationalised, and enforced.
If the book has a limitation, it lies in its relative silence on resistance from below. But this absence is less a flaw than an invitation.
Rot reminds us that critical scholarship must always seek out the struggles, however obscured, that shape and contest the terms of domination.
In that spirit, Scanlan does more than provide a history of suffering. He urges us to remember differently, seeing famine not in terms of fate, but the result of choices made within a system that prioritised capital over care, empire over emancipation.
For those of us seeking to understand the famine not as a tragic accident but as a structural crime — and to think critically about how its legacies endure — Rot is essential reading.
Photograph courtesy of William Murphy. Published under a Creative Commons license.