Preface

Summary

A gigantic economic and humanitarian tragedy caused by disease. A crisis that required, in response, an unprecedented programme of government intervention that drove the Treasury to the brink of fiscal meltdown. A crisis that put the constituent countries of the United Kingdom further down the path towards separation. This may sound like a description of Great Britain in the age of the covid-19 pandemic in the 2020s. Yet it could also very easily be a description of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the age of the Irish famine of the 1840s. In the late summer of 1845 phytophthora infestans, a potato blight rapidly spreading around the world, was detected in Ireland for the first time. In Britain, within two years, exactly 175 years before the publication of this book, the fiscal demands of this crisis triggered a series of severe financial crises, which threw the funding for the relief effort in Ireland off course. In Ireland, within five years or so of the blight’s appearance, a quarter of its population had either unexpectedly died or emigrated. The sense that the British government’s response to the famine was inadequate inspired generations of Irish nationalists and fuelled their demands for separation, culminating in the independence of the Irish Free State in 1922, a century to the year before the publication of this book.

Why was excess mortality during the famine so high, and who or what should we blame for it? This is a question that has consumed the thoughts of many polemicists, historians and economists since the 1840s. Many point the finger of blame at the British government. Ireland was a constituent part of the United Kingdom, the richest country in the world at the time, so why were its poor left to starve? Those of a nationalist persuasion claim that the inadequate relief effort amounts to ‘genocide’ by Britain against Ireland. Most scholars, in recent decades, have preferred to emphasise the influence of laissez-faire ideas on policymakers. This book excavates from the archives a hitherto ignored narrative, which links the famine to the United Kingdom’s transition onto the ‘classic’ gold standard policies and the political and financial crises they caused in the 1840s. The narrative this book unveils is not of laissez-faire, but of unprecedented government intervention to save lives that went disastrously off course due to political and financial instability in Britain.