Padraic Scanlan
Padraic Scanlan is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, cross-appointed to the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies. He is also a Research Associate at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St. Michael's College.
His research focuses on the history of labour, enslaved and free, in Britain and the British empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently in the early stages of research on a new project, on the transformation of the line between ‘home’ and ‘work’ in the industrial era.
His most recent book, Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, out now from Robinson Books and Basic Books, reinterprets the history of the Irish Great Famine (1845-1851). In the first half of the nineteenth century, nowhere in Europe – or the world – did the working poor depend as completely on potatoes as in Ireland. To many British observers, potatoes were evidence of a lack of modernity and ‘civilization’ among the Irish. Ireland before the Famine, however, more closely resembled capitalism’s future than its past. Irish labourers were paid some of the lowest wages in the British empire, and relied on the abundance of the potato to survive. He shows how the staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potatoes failed.
