I had a chuckle to see another North Korea flair in this topic of all places. Cheers, /u/koliano!

This isn't my area of expertise, so a really detailed answer is beyond me. However, the Irish famine is a pretty common topic while you're studying periods of mass hunger, and it was something I saw pop up occasionally while reading about the mechanics behind North Korea's famine (1994-1998). There's something that I think might provide some helpful context for your question -- namely, how we study and think about famine has changed a lot over the last 40 years, and the line between "genocide" and "famine" has gotten blurrier as we recognize that famine is not really an accident.

So -- was the Irish "potato famine" a genocide against the Irish?

Short answer: The English didn't commit genocide by the strictest definition of the term, but they did create the circumstances that led to the famine.

Long answer: As others have pointed out, there's a troublesome and often politically-charged distinction to be made between genocide and famine:

• Genocide implies intent. It's not enough for millions of people to die: Somebody has to want them dead and engineer a way to do it, or capitalize on a situation likely to result in mass death. Nobody wants to be told they were responsible for genocide; it's a severe blow to the moral and political authority of the country involved. The Turks resist efforts to characterize what the Armenians call the "Great Crime" as genocide. Russia will tell you to fuck off when you raise the issue of the Holodomor and Stalin's being a huge asshole to the Ukrainians. The Chinese government only recently stopped censoring public discussion of the famine related to the Great Leap Forward. Nobody wants to admit to having committed genocide or -- if it's not genocide by the technical definition of the term -- anything that looks like it.
• By contrast, famine is seen as a tragedy that nobody could have prevented. Crops fail. Drought happens. Diseases, predators, and wildfires kill livestock. Earthquakes and floods destroy your ability to move food around. Something bad happens that interferes with your society's ability to grow, store, or transport food, and lots of people die despite your best efforts. Famine is the second horseman of the apocalypse, perennial as the grass, cold and grimly present as its brothers pestilence, war, and death. It is ubiquitous in human history and the immutable lesson is that it can happen to anyone.

Except it doesn't. Certain human societies have been strangely resistant to famine despite weathering the same shocks that caused mass starvation in similar circumstances elsewhere.

Historians and economists had a collective "Eureka!" moment in the late 20th century when we realized that famine DOESN'T just happen, and that it probably never has. Hunger can happen despite your best efforts to prevent it, but famine is the result of politics.

Before we go any farther, we need to talk about a guy named Amartya Sen. He's an Indian economist and historian who's written a lot of really famous and influential pieces about a variety of topics, and he was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for his work on welfare economics. In terms of popular reach, he's probably best-known for a 1990 essay on "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing," which addressed the result of sex-selective abortions in Asia. However, in the academic world he's arguably most famous for his work on famine in human history, and in particular a theory that sounds bananas when you first hear it, and then more and more frighteningly plausible.

I'll break it into two parts:

• Sen argued that no famine over the last 1,000 years can be attributed to anything other than primarily man-made causes. This took a while to get traction; we're used to saying that X famine was caused by a flood, or Y famine happened because of a drought, etc. Sen pointed out that natural disasters and crop failures are actually pretty common, but famines aren't usually the result. Left to their own devices, humans are pretty good at finding and storing food as proof against unpredictable shortages. In order to create a famine, you have to have a bad, unstable, and/or corrupt political/economic system that can't weather a sudden shock and is thrown into crisis. We've gotten used to blaming the shock (e.g., the flood, the drought), when in reality it's just a convenient excuse. The real cause is the shitty and inflexible system that existed before it.
• Sen further argued that no famine has occurred in a democracy with a free press. The basic idea is that government that isn't accountable to its people is notoriously unresponsive to its needs, and a free press is good at noticing and publicizing problems that government needs to address. There have been some quibbles over this, mostly related to pockets of continuing hunger in India, but for the most part this is a pretty uncontroversial theory.

Sen published his first work on famine in 1981 and has studied the issue on and off since. His work has heavily colored subsequent discussions of hunger and the political systems that create/d it, and it's a big part of the reason we're disposed to evaluate past famines differently these days. Interestingly, the 1981 piece is primarily about another famine that the British had a hand in (the 1943 Bengal famine) due to rice and transport ship confiscations setting off a price panic.

So let's consider the Irish potato famine : Again, I have to leave the nitty-gritty details to someone with a better command of this period than I've got, but I can tell you about the commentary that the Irish famine attracts when historians and statisticians are discussing the mechanics of hunger in modern works.

The potato blight has been commonly cited as the reason that the famine happened, and it's entirely true that it played a role. The lack of genetic diversity among the strain of potatoes being grown in Ireland at the time made the island incredibly susceptible to the blight. However, it was a classic example of a "shock" that revealed the underlying corruption in the economic system that surrounded it. The blight may have started the famine, but it didn't actually cause it (if that distinction makes any sense).

So what did cause it? Britain's Corn Laws were an aggressively protectionist series of tariffs enacted with the intent to keep grain prices high for the benefit of domestic producers. (TL:DR: Landowners didn't want to compete against cheap grain from abroad and also had to pay their farm laborers a living wage, so Parliament levied high taxes on foreign grain and tweaked them as necessary to try to bump domestic grain to what they considered ideal prices.) The Irish poor (of whom there were many, for a variety of very complicated historical and socioeconomic reasons) were largely unable to afford grain as a result of the Corn Laws, and on the generally-small holdings they farmed (for which they paid punitive rents to largely absentee English landlords) could only grow potatoes in sufficient quantity to feed their families.

The potato was thus the staple food, and the blight an utter catastrophe. When potatoes were no longer available, the poor burned through their meager savings quickly to buy grain, and when that ran out, they starved en masse. Parliament repealed the Corn Laws two years into the famine, but it was too little and too late, and also didn't address the other systemic issues (principally landlord exploitation) that contributed to the famine.

So it's pretty apparent why the genocide/famine distinction is a touchy one here:

• Did the English commit genocide against the Irish? Not as such.
• Did they create the circumstances that led to the famine? Yes, and most historians judge the government's response to the famine as woefully inadequate, to compound the issue.

Calling the Irish Potato Famine a genocide is fairly contentious, and is almost exclusively a political thought. There were certainly a number of political and socioeconomic factors arising from the British rule of Ireland, including widespread poverty in the aftermath of (and despite) Catholic emancipation in 1829, which led to Irish farmers being unable to effectively produce crops. But there were also a multitude of biological reasons, predominantly lack of genetic diversity among potato crops and the rapid spread of blight, which shared an equal if not greater (and ultimately causative) part in the incipiency of the Potato Famine. This is particularly important, as the 1948 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 26 explicitly defines genocide as an act committed with intent to destroy a racial, ethnic, religious or national group. The British government maintained a fair deal of discriminatory and anti-Irish policies and laws during that time, but the famine itself did not arise out of intent, nor any explicit action on the British government's part to target the Irish population. Their response to the famine, while arguably weak and to a point ineffective, was ultimately intended to halt the effects of the famine by providing relief to those affected through public works. So by the United Nations' definition, the Irish Potato Famine would not be classified a genocide, but there is room for discussion on to exactly what extent the policies and reactions by the British government either caused or exacerbated the famine.

According to Cecil Woodham-Smith (in her 1962 book The Great Hunger), the English gave minimal aid mainly due to a rigid ideological belief in free markets. It seems that both political parties, but especially the Whigs who were in power during the worst of it, really believed that the market would provide all that was needful regardless of context, and that any aid would make things worse.

Their evident dislike of the Irish made this an easy belief for them to sustain.

I've done a lot of research on this subject and I've recently posted a very detailed answer in a different subreddit. I will copy-paste that answer here, including the sources, and link the actual discussion so you can also check out other -very hostile- replies and my answers to those :

There is a lot of misconception about the Irish famine in this thread. I have done a lot of research on this very same subject in my capacity as a historian and I can't help but share what I've encountered. It might not be read by many people considering this was posted 7 hours ago, but it's worth a shot. History incoming, skip if you're not interested.

I see that it's still common practice to solely put the Irish famine on the English government. I even see someone saying how it was genocide and that the harvest was more than sufficient to feed all Irish citizens. That's just completely incorrect. Genocide implies a deliberate strategy and malintent. What actually happened was a lot more complex and way less malificent. The potato famine was caused by the phytopthora infestans, a previously unknown type of fungus. It's suspected to have arrived from Southern America and it might have been only moderately succesful for awhile due to various reasons, one of which is meteorological conditions. Before 1700, cultivation of the potato wasn't that widespread. Its leaves are poisenous and the edible part lies underground, so it was actually considered to be a demonic plant and it was only sometimes given to animals as sustenance. However, once people discovered how efficient it was (resilient, high calories, grows anywhere) it quickly blew up and became one of the most important foodstuffs in Europe. When the phytopthora infestans finally struck, it destroyed upto 90% of the harvest in Central Europe. It hit hardest in Ireland, Belgium and northern France, but other regions weren't spared either. The extent of the damage was very regionally specific however, so the isolated position of Ireland already put it at a heavy disadvantage. Regions in both Germany and France could rely on the supply from less central regions to alleviate their needs. The same could be said for Belgium, but both Belgium and Ireland were mostly left to their own devices.

However one major difference between Belgium and Ireland was the fact that poor farmers in Ireland mostly relied on the monoculture of the potato to complement their diet while agriculture in Belgium was vastly more diverse. At the same time, the government in Belgium was still very new and it's power was rooted in a long tradition of municipal power. While Ireland was largely dependent on the English government, which was still controlled by 'laissez-faire' entrepeneurs. Communication between Ireland and the English government could also be called sporadic and troublesome at best. Despite this rough communication and the reluctance to abandon their 'laissez-faire' ways, the English government made some attempts to intervene in Ireland. Unfortunatly, most of what they did came either too late, was a grossly incompetent action or it backfired because of miscommunication - which honestly has been the trend ever since. So in short, it wasn't some malificent ploy by the English government to starve the Irish. It was a famine with far-reaching consequences allover Europe exacerbated by the monocultural tradition of Ireland, horrible infrastructure and it's geographical and political isolation. The incompetence of the English government didn't help either, but they lacked the tools and the mindset to do so. They often reacted just as poorly to regional issues.

As K.H Connell stated in his article on the potato in Ireland, no government could have prevented the catastrophe that was the Irish Famine. That being said, there were power structures and laws in place that exacerbated the situation to some extent, one could blame the Brittish government for not adressing these in time. However, given the swift occurence of the disease, the general lack of infrastructure to assess or adress the situation and the prevalance of 'laissez-faire' politics, it can hardly be called malintent.

Connell, K. H., ‘The Potato in Ireland’, in: Past & Present, 1962

EDIT : Because a lot of people are saying that the export of produce shows the malintent of the English government, check out my other comments. The farmers in Ireland were 'forced' to sell in bulk to the market. This was practically the same for every other region in Central Europe struck by famine.

EDIT 2 : Two threads on /r/Askhistorians telling the same exact story from a slightly different perspective :

1. Would you classify the Irish Potato Famine a genocide? If so, why?
2. Historians, what's your take on the argument that the Irish Potato Famine was in essence an act of genocide perpetrated by the British government?.

EDIT 3 : I can see how many people are still calling bullshit and feel very strongly about this. To prove that this isn't as controversial in historiography as you might think, I'll post a few sources by reputable historians, so you can check it out yourself.

**Sources : **

• CONNELL, K. H., ‘The Potato in Ireland’, in: Past & Present, 1962

• VANHAUTE, Eric, ‘”So worthy an example to Ireland”. The subsistence and industrial crisis of 1845-1850 in Flanders’, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard & Ó Gráda, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, 2007

• VIVIER, Nadine, ‘A memorable crisis but not a potato crisis’, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard & Ó Gráda, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, 2007

• SCHELLEKENS, Jona, Irish Famines and English Mortality in the Eighteenth Century, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1996

• Ó GRÁDA, Cormac, ‘Markets and Famines in Pre-industrial Europe’, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2005

• MOKYR, Joel, ‘Industrialization and Poverty in Ireland and the Netherlands’, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1980

• MAHLERWEIN, Gunther, ‘The consequences of the potato blight in South Germany’, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard & Ó Gráda, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, Turnhout, 2007

• KINEALY, Christine, A death-dealing famine: the great hunger in Ireland, Londen, 1997.

I don't find the debate over the term genocide very useful in regards to the Famine. British attitudes,even at government level were very complex and varied during the crisis. Thrre are some essential points to keep in mind :

1. The crop failure was enormous. Sen and his popularisers do not really address how an early nineteenth century state could have addressed such a deep and prolonged agricultural collapse. Even closing the ports would only have made food cheaper, it would not have given the food to the starving.

2. British policy was initially very radical for the time with a huge intervention in the economy. It changed for a range of political, economic and ideological reasons. This change certainly exacerbated the crisis but it was not primarily designed to increase the casualties. Despicable yes, genocidal no.

3. There were some in the government who believed the Famine was an act of divine providence acting through the laws of economics. I explain this to students as seeing the Famine as a 'downsizing'. I don't think 'genocidal' deals with this attitude in a historical way. One of the reasons for it, for example was a belief that the British State should not bail out the Irish economic elite.

To summarise the Famine was the outcome of a natural disaster combined with a particular response from state which made things much worse. We should criticise the British government response both in hindsight and in historic terms but I am not convinced that debating genocide accomplishes much.

A couple of useful sources:

Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-50 (1999)

Liam Kennedy, The Great Irish Famine and the Holocaust http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/irishhistorylive/IrishHistoryResources/Articlesandlecturesbyourteachingstaff/TheGreatIrishFamineandtheHolocaust/

Charles Read, Ireland and the perils of fixed exchange rates, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/ireland-and-the-perils-of-fixed-exchange-rates