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Examples of British callousness were indeed thick on the ground. Some politicians welcomed the depopulation, which would, one cabinet minister’s agent promised, “give us room to become civilized.” Others said that giving food to soup kitchens actually did harm; if “large numbers would have perished of starvation,” one banking official reasoned, “the material relations of the survivors would have been re-established.”

England’s defenders retort that although anti-Irish politicians said awful things they were ignored. In practice, the starving had to be massed if they were to be fed; delivering huge amounts of food to scattered families is not easy, even today. The exporters, moreover, were mainly Irish farmers who sold pricy meat and grain to buy cheap food for their families. Failure to accomplish the unprecedented, however dire the consequences, is not a moral lapse—or so the argument goes.

No matter what degree of culpability should be assigned to Britain, the consequences of the famine to Ireland are indisputable: it broke the nation in half. At a million or more fatalities, it was one of the deadliest famines in history, in terms of the percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost forty million people. Only the famine of 1918–22 in the Soviet Union may have been worse. Within a decade of the blight another two million fled Ireland. Many more followed in subsequent decades, inexorably driving its population down. The nation never regained its footing. As late as the 1960s its population was half what it had been in 1840. Today Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only nation in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.

LAZY BEDS

The Great Hunger left such a scar in Ireland that historians could barely bring themselves to look at it for more than a century. Since the 1970s, though, the famine has been the subject of hundreds of books and articles. In all the outpour, though, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to its cause, P. infestans—unfortunately, because the oomycete was the protagonist in the first calamity of modern commodity agriculture.

P. infestans came to Ireland with surprising alacrity and overtook the country with puzzling speed. Ireland, an island nation, is eight hundred miles away from West Flanders. Between them are the North Sea and the Irish Sea. Blight spores are fragile: a single hour of exposure to the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight is enough to cut their likelihood of germinating by 95 percent. Even a light rain knocks them from the air. A widely cited ecological model suggests that as a practical matter they cannot surf the winds further than twenty to thirty miles. After tests in Washington State, three scientists concluded that in perfect conditions—strong winds, cool temperatures, no direct sunlight or rain—blight spores might be able to move seventy miles, though fewer than 5 percent would survive. Except around Northern Ireland, the Irish Sea is wider than seventy miles. If the researchers are correct, blight spores could only have been blown to Ireland by traveling from southeast to northwest England, then floating over the North Channel to Belfast—a remarkable journey. (Technically, they are not spores but “sporangia,” the bags of spores released by blight, but I am ignoring this distinction for the moment.)

Rain fell, sometimes heavily, on twenty-four of the thirty days after September 13, 1845, when the blight was first reported in Ireland. Yet despite the rain P. infestans swept across the country, striking with a remorselessness not seen anywhere else. Something about Ireland was uniquely vulnerable—but what? One part of the answer was the sheer number of potatoes, a fat target for the blight. Another part was the uniformity of the crop. According to Ó Gráda, the blight historian, about half of Ireland was dominated by a single, outstandingly productive variety: the Lumper.