Let's read "Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine"

Let's read "Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine" by Padraic X. Scanlan. Powell's, Amazon, Audiobook

This book looks special, so I'm excited to have a chat with you all about it. Here's a taste of an FT review of the book:
"Rot is timely then not just for its subject but its sobriety. Scanlan, a historian and associate professor at the University of Toronto, is rigorous in his approach and quick to dismantle some common misconceptions about the famine and its political context. ... Yet Scanlan’s commitment to objectivity proves more damning than any partisan diatribe, exposing the Union as a fraud; the relationship between England and Ireland was one of parasite and host. As emotive as the subject may be, Rot moves beyond sentiment, ideology and the false comforts of denial and denunciation. Scanlan evades the ventriloquism of more polemical histories. He lets the dead speak, though their silences are equally instructive and haunting. Carefully, he reconstructs how the nightmare coalesced and who it served."

Here's the book description:
A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster

In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.

In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and 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. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism.

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.