The Irish Potato Famine, which began in 1845, looms large not only in the imagination of that country, but also here in the United States, where so many Irish migrants arrived in desperation. Phytophthora infestans caused blight across Europe—but only in Ireland did crop failures result in devastation so vast that the period is known in that country simply as the “Great Hunger.” Why did the blight strike Ireland, newly part of the United Kingdom, so much harder than it did elsewhere in Europe? In Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, historian Padraic X. Scanlan identifies the policies of the British Empire as the primary reason for the deaths of roughly a million people and the exodus of two million more. But Britain didn’t perpetuate a genocide, Scanlan argues—its choices reflected deep political beliefs in market forces that would reveal themselves to be anything but natural.

Go beyond the episode:

• Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
• For more on the famines that struck the rest of the British Empire, check out Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
• CATU Ireland organizes around housing and community issues across the island
• It’s true: Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is all about the Irish housing market

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