> Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later.

Ireland was exporting food throughout the famine, enough to have fed all of its people. The story there is one of economics and hands-off capitalism as much or more than it is about crop failure.

I don’t think capitalism is to blame in this particular instance.

As I recall, Britain arranged the Acts of Union so they could exploit Ireland as a cheap source of food, labor, and soldiers. The success of the Napoleonic Wars encouraged them to accelerate production by any means necessary. They may not have intended for Ireland to become a food monoculture, or anticipated its failure by 1840, but they certainly did little to remedy the situation their imperialism brought about.