The Political Economy of the Potato

Even at the risk of redundancy, it is still worth rehearsing what appear, after the upsurge of research of the last decade or so, to be the facts of the case. The Irish Famine, which commenced in 1845 with a failure of the potato crop and recurred over large parts of the country until 1851, was the greatest demographic catastrophe in European history. At least one million people died of starvation and a further million left the country, commencing a trend of massive emigration that continued unabated until the end of the last century. The Famine was thus directly responsible for the disappearance of at least one quarter of the population, estimated in the British census of 1841 at 8.1 million. As is well known, the vulnerability of the Irish population to such a subsistence crisis was occasioned by the very abundance of the potato, which was capable of remarkable reproduction on poor and marginal land with the result that a family could subsist for almost the whole year on the yield of a one-acre plot. Over the previous century, the Irish poor, dispossessed by settler colonialism of the more fertile lands and driven onto the bogs and mountainsides, had developed what is now understood to be a sophisticated and ecologically inventive means of survival on the basis of the potato crop and had succeeded over and again in reclaiming marginal land in the most inhospitable regions of the island, especially along the western seaboard. ¹ Despite regular but generally short-lived and localized failures of the potato crop, the success of the Irish in cultivating this root had enabled both a high rate of population increase and the progressive subdivision of landholdings. This system of potato cultivation on small, rented plots, combined with occasional labor on larger farms for low wages or for payment in kind, was known as cottierism.