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In the nineteenth century, as Britain became the world's most powerful industrial empire, Ireland starved. The Great Famine fractured long-held assumptions about political economy and 'civilisation', threatening disorder in Britain itself. Ireland was a laboratory for empire, shaping British ideas about colonisation, population, ecology and work. Scanlan reinterprets the history of this time and the result is a revelatory account of the Irish Great Famine (1845-1851).