Opening with a donation from a group of enslaved people in Alabama, Shrout’s excellent book, Aiding Ireland, leads the reader through eight chapters which consider the ways that the Irish Famine, or An Gorta Mór, became a useful touchstone for myriad political causes — and, therefore, a useful cause to donate to. For those who were at a distance, geographically or emotionally, from the realities of its harshest impacts, the discussions and coverage became a space of negotiation and opportunity. As Shrout notes, there was a ‘semantic emptiness’ (168) to the Famine which allowed people, particularly politicians and newspaper editors, but also civil society and other oppressed peoples, to overlay or imbed their own political and social causes on to it. Part of the exceptionalism of the Irish Famine in popular memory is in the international response that it prompted. So, why did it go ‘viral’? As Shrout persuasively argues, ‘the [Irish] famine was the right catastrophe at the right time’ (179).

There are layers to the structure of this book which work very effectively. The chapters begin geographically: in Ireland, before moving out to Britain and empire, they then move to the United States. This geographical ‘zooming out’ allows readers to follow the ways that social, political and economic debates, which began in Ireland and focused on a local issue, were repurposed and reframed to make very specific points about Britishness, Americanness, free trade, landlord responsibility and tenants’ rights, and humanity itself. These themes cross the chapters and allow Shrout to, for example in chapter 5, draw comparisons between the New York Anti-Rent campaigners and anti-landlord violence in Ireland during the 1830s and 1840s. While previous scholars have made important contributions comparing Irish and American battles for land reform, they have traditionally focused on the later nineteenth century. By examining tenants’ rights during the Famine period, Shrout presents readers with a fascinating insight on post-revolutionary America and the lasting influences of the British state abroad. It also allows Shrout to return to the sites of the famine, where newspaper editors broke with their colleagues elsewhere. Instead of attaching their own political motivations to the Famine, they frequently tried to seek a conciliatory path with landlords: people with power who they hoped would be charmed or shamed into helping the poorest in their society. For those closest to the devastation, there was no ‘semantic emptiness’ to the Famine: only desperation and glimpses of hope that people would do what was ‘right’. Though what is ‘the right thing to do’ in moments of famine was, as this book demonstrates, a contentious question.

The focus on land and exile from an ancestral homeland continues in chapter 8, which explores the rhetoric surrounding donations by indigenous Americans, especially the Cherokee and Choctaw peoples. While indigenous Americans may have had a sense of solidarity with Irish tenants evicted from their land, forced to leave and confronted with disease and high mortality rates, enslaved Black Americans did not necessarily feel this solidarity (chapter 7). As Shrout notes, working long hours for substandard food was not unusual for enslaved Americans, and while Irish people affected by the Famine may have been subject to racialised and Malthusian condemnation, their humanity was not in question. In addition, the American press and Black abolitionists actively discouraged a sense of solidarity between the groups. So, if this was the case, why did the First African Baptist Church in Virginia donate $26 to Ireland in 1846? And why did enslaved people on that Alabama plantation opt to give their (often illicitly saved) money to Irish famine relief? Their enslavers were often actively giving, very publicly, to Ireland, while simultaneously repurposing the language of slavery to warn of Irish famine at the hands of the British government or southern repression through U.S. federal overreach. For their enslavers, donating was an opportunity to claim moral authority for slavery (chapter 6) in the face of abolitionist rhetoric which accused them of heartlessness, and federal legislation which increasingly sought to curtail the institution. Shrout argues that for enslaved and free Black Americans and for indigenous Americans, Irish famine relief offered an opportunity to replicate white norms of liberalism and civil society, allowing them to at once resist their status in society and highlight their own humanity to white America.

This questioning of who ‘belongs’, who deserves aid and who should provide that aid is another theme that is drawn out throughout the book. Chapter 1 introduces the readers to Irish political figures and newspaper editors who used the Famine to make an argument for, or against, an ‘Irish nation’. Chapter 2 moves this conversation to the provincial British cities where M.P.s in the north of England and Scotland seized upon the Famine to ask questions about Westminster’s responsibilities towards its citizens and to press for free trade and repeal of the Corn Laws. While chapter 1 focuses on how the Famine was used to shape and reshape ideas of ‘Irishness’, chapter 2 argues that it was used as an opportunity to expand understandings of ‘Britishness’ (including Ireland) and encourage a stronger sense of solidarity and mutual aid. The debates surrounding Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom and within the British Empire during the nineteenth century continue to this day, so it is unsurprising that the third chapter moves to questions of imperial obligation. While provincial newspapers fought to be heard by Westminster, the British government and the London-based newspapers that promoted them were more interested in how aid for Ireland would be seen, and understood, within the empire more widely. In turn, chapters 4 and 5 question what it was to be ‘American’ — as a post-colonised state, a proto-colonial state and an enslaving state.

Shrout’s book joins a stellar line up in the N.Y.U. Press Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. It is beautifully produced and affordably priced, which allows, and deserves, a wide audience across scholars of Irish, British and American history, international philanthropy, and the global nineteenth century to benefit from its insights. Questions surrounding empathy, perceptions of humanity, and proximity to suffering remain at the forefront of public debate, and Aiding Ireland presents us with important frameworks through which to understand them.