Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine

Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine

Scanlan, Padraic X.

Paperback

General Political ScienceIrish History

Publisher Price: $21.99

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 27, 2026

ISBN10: 1541609190
ISBN13: 9781541609198
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: Oct 27 2026
Pages: 352
Height: 0.79 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.25
Language: English
A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland's most infamous disaster.

Vigorous and engaging. --Fintan O'Toole, The New Yorker

In 1845, European potato fields were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland that the blight's devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers a new account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland's place in the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation.

Ireland's overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. And when famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish.

Uncovering the disaster's roots in Britain's deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.

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