From 1845 to 1852, as Britain secured a place as the world''s largest and most powerful industrial empire, Ireland starved. The Great Famine fractured British confidence in long-held assumptions about political economy, ''civilisation'' and freedom and raised a spectre of disorder in Britain itself.
The Irish Question shows where Ireland stood in the British empire, and tells both the horrific story of the Famine and the long history of Ireland as a laboratory for colonialism and imperial rule elsewhere in the empire.
Britain and Ireland are friends, enemies, intimates, and strangers to each other. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Britain stood secure in its place as the world''s most powerful empire, a terrible famine in Ireland revealed the contradictions and violence at the heart of British imperialism.
The Irish Question is a new history of the Great Famine (1845-52) in both the United Kingdom and the wider world, revealing the place of Ire
