ABSTRACT
In 1845 the people of Ireland were suddenly afflicted with an ecological catastrophe. The potato blight, a fungal infestation called phytophthora infestans, was a new disease, unknown in Europe before the 1840s. It attacked the leaves of the potato plant first, then the stalk and then the tuber. The potatoes, when not already reduced to a pestilent pulp before the harvest, often turned out to contain the blight within their apparently healthy exterior. The disease was carried through the air by spores, devastating the crop throughout the country. Nobody at the time knew what the blight was, or where it came from. The rural poor were apt to see it as a visitation from God, perhaps in punishment for their wastefulness in previous seasons when potatoes were so abundant that not all of them could be consumed. They referred to it as an gorta mór, ‘the great hunger’. Botanists at first thought the blight was a form of wet-rot caused by an even damper Irish summer than usual; it took almost thirty years to find an antidote, based on the realization that it was a fungus. It is now known that the blight reached Europe from the eastern United States, having probably originated in Peru. In Europe, the blight affected Flanders, southern France, Switzerland, eastern Germany, southern Scandinavia and Scotland, as well as Ireland. But it spread most rapidly in damp conditions, such as those in Ireland. Only in Ireland did the population depend so overwhelmingly on the potato, and only there did the blight lead to demographic disaster. 1
