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When potato blight destroyed Ireland's staple crop from 1845, Treasury official Charles Trevelyan directed relief from London. He shut down Peel's Indian-corn purchases and moved relief onto public works and then workhouses and soup kitchens, while grain and livestock continued to be exported from Ireland under armed guard. About a million people died and more than a million emigrated, and Trevelyan was knighted in 1848.
Officials believed that government food supply would displace private traders and create dependence. So they would not stop exports or sell food below market price, even where no functioning market existed. The book argues that economic orthodoxy, applied without adjustment during a crisis, made a crop failure into a famine.
Trevelyan and others described the famine as a providential judgment and the Irish as idle and dependent. Seeing the victims as morally at fault made withholding help look like a way of reforming them. When administrators explain suffering by the character of those who suffer, the costs of their policy stop looking like costs.
Relief was built so that only the truly desperate would take it. Starving people had to do hard labour on public works to earn wages. Later, the Gregory Clause denied aid to anyone holding more than a quarter-acre, which forced families to give up their land before they could eat. These tests screened out people who did not need help, but they also exhausted, evicted, or killed many who did.