This is John Batchel, a conversation with the author, Patrick Scanlon, about his new book,

The Story of the Imperial English Empire, exploiting the Irish peasantry, abusing them for decades,

centuries. And when the famine came, the Irish farmers were vulnerable to everything, including

the depredations of the famine, because they had no alternative resource for food because they

were abandoned by their owners, their masters. They lived on rented land. They didn't own their own

farms. A detail here is that the Irish landscape was not ancient. Patrick explains why this is

critical to understand Ireland's uses to the empire. It was a moneymaker for parliament. Here's more. Much more of the book

Tonight and Tomorrow Night. Like something from the 16th century. But one of the things I think

that's important to understand about the history of the Irish famine and one of the themes that

I emphasize in Rot is that those appearances can be deceiving, right?

The Irish countryside looked old, but in fact, Ireland was quite closely connected to global

markets. It was quite closely connected to British markets. And the Shirley's were not

kind of old-fashioned medieval landlords. They were

quite sophisticated, very modern merchants, right? They sold agricultural products. They collected

rent. They employed a staff of professional managers and land agents to collect rent on their

behalf. And so I take in the book Shirley Castle as an emblem, both of the kind of

anachronistic aesthetics of Ireland, but also it's very real economic modernity in the early

19th century. And that disjuncture is really important to the book. And I think it's really

important to understanding the famine.