They called it the Great Hunger.

Perhaps a million people died.

And despite it all taking place more than 150 years ago,

the country's population has never recovered.

It was a terrible famine.

And yet, bizarrely, it took place at the centre was a terrible famine.

And yet, bizarrely, it took place at the center of the largest empire, the world that ever seen.

The United Kingdom.

The world's largest economy.

You're listening to Dan Snow's history, and in this episode I'm going to ask how the

great Irish famine could possibly have happened. How did the United Kingdom, with all its

boasts of modernity and its technology and its ability to project power across the other

side of the world, how did it allow, perhaps a million

of its own people, to die during repeated crop failures?

Well, that's what we're going to answer in this podcast, and the answer obviously begins

with the observation that all parts

of that United Kingdom were not entirely considered equal. Ireland was a largely unwilling

participant in that United Kingdom project. It was a colonial possession more than an equal

partner. The Irish had their own laguaries, their own religious, social, cultural identities.

And so crop failure there wasn't quite the same as if there had been a catastrophic crop failure in Worcestershire or Midlothian.

And even the politicians at the time acknowledged it and knew about it.

It was this strange dislocation at the heart, the British Imperial Project.

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