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In the nineteenth century, as Britain became the world''s most powerful industrial empire, Ireland starved. The Great Famine fractured long-held assumptions about political economy and ''civilisation'', threatening disorder in Britain itself. Ireland was a laboratory for empire, shaping British ideas about colonisation, population, ecology and work. Scanlan reinterprets the history of this time and the result is a revelatory account of the Irish Great Famine (1845-1851). In the first half of the nineteenth century, nowhere in Europe - or the world - did the working poor depend as completely on potatoes as in Ireland. To many British observers, potatoes were evidence of a lack of modernity and ''civilization'' among the Irish. Ireland before the Famine, however, more closely resembled capitalism''s future than its past. Irish labourers were paid some of the lowest wages in the British empire, and relied on the abundance of the potato to survive. Scanlan expertly shows how the staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potatoes failed.

Préface
In the nineteenth century, as Britain became the world's most powerful industrial empire, Ireland starved. The Great Famine fractured long-held assumptions about political economy and 'civilisation', threatening disorder in Britain itself. Ireland was a laboratory for empire, shaping British ideas about colonisation, population, ecology and work.

Auteur
PADRAIC X. SCANLAN earned a BA (Hons) in History from McGill University in 2008, and a PhD in History from Princeton University in 2013. He is Assistant 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, which, in 2018, was awarded the James A. Rawley Prize and the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, and Slave Empire.

Texte du rabat

Framing the Irish Famine within the context of the British empire is revelatory. An incredibly important work.' Sathnam Sanghera

A landmark history of work, poverty, land reform and political economy in the era of the Irish Famine.

Praise for Padraig X. Scanlon's Slave Empire

'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking' *Guardian

• 'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history' Irish Times

'Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose' The Economist

Résumé
A landmark history of work, poverty, land reform and political economy in the era of the Irish Famine.