A Brief History of the Potato

The humble potato is probably the first thing most people think of when Irish food is mentioned.  It's a staple in both Great Britain and Ireland, and if there's one thing Americans learned about Irish history in school, it's that a lot of people came to this country because of the "Irish Potato Famine".  What some may not realize is that the potato's importance in the Irish and British diet is actually quite a recent development.

The potato, like peanuts, corn, bananas, and many other foods now widely available in Europe, is native to the western hemisphere.  Spanish Conquistadors (or, according to some, either Sir Francis Drake or Sir Walter Raleigh) brought it back to Europe from Peru in the mid 16th century.  The exact origin of the potato as a food crop in Europe is unclear, but there are records of potatoes being cultivated in the Canary Islands (Spanish territory) from 1562, and they had been cultivated in England by 1600.  Records also indicate that potatoes were first planted in Ireland in the 1580's or '90's, possibly  introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh, who planted them on his estate in Munster, or (more likely) as a result of frequent trade with Spain.

William of Orange.
This man is likely the
reason your Irish
ancestors emigrated.

It wasn't until a little later, however, that the potato began to replace oats and barley a dietary staple in the British Isles.  The reason it did so is largely political.  In the 16th and 17th centuries, the potato was merely a supplemental vegetable, eaten in small quantities by all classes of society.  Then, in 1689, the Protestant English Parliament deposed the Catholic King, James II, and replaced him with his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.  Naturally, Irish Catholics took issue with this; they'd been hoping for greater religious freedom than they'd had since Henry VIII had decided to create his own religion so he could have a divorce.  King James knew this, and rallied his supporters in Ireland.  There was a brief war which culminated in James's defeat by the Orangemen at the Battle of the Boyne in 1691, and the King and many prominent nobles fled to Rome to get the Pope's support for a future invasion of England.  (Obviously, this strategy failed rather spectacularly, but more on that later.)

In retribution for this rebellion, William of Orange and Parliament passed what were called the Penal Laws, essentially depriving Catholics of many civil rights, such as the right to hold public office or a military commission, or the right to own property over a certain value.  The most important for our purposes regards inheritance.  If all of a family's children were Catholic, the property had to be divided amongst them, rather than passed down to the eldest son (if one child was Protestant, they could inherit the entire farm, thus depriving their siblings of a livelihood).  The result was that by the time the laws were repealed in the 19th century, Ireland's rural poor were trying to feed their families by farming as little as an acre (sometimes less) of land.

Rooster potato, the most common variety
in Ireland.  It looks like a red potato, but is
actually starchy, like a russet. 

Enter the potato.  It's really an amazing crop.  It has excellent nutritional value; a steady diet of potatoes supplemented with a little milk will keep you reasonably healthy for months at a time, and it's more filling than a lot of other foods.  It requires significantly less acreage to produce the same yield as grain crops.  It thrives in even poor soil, and because it's a root, it's less vulnerable to pests, disease, and weather than grains are.  For all these reasons, the potato became a very popular crop all over Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, but nowhere so much as in Ireland, where it allowed poor families to survive on tiny plots of land.

That is, until a bight caused the crop to rot before it was ready to harvest every few years from 1835 to the mid 1850's, and nearly every year from 1845-'55.  By 1860, about a quarter of the Irish population had either emigrated or died, and the southwest had been particularly devastated.  What went wrong?  The answer is quite simple: there were only a few varieties of potato cultivated in Ireland at the time, so almost all the plants were susceptible to the bight.  The problem was solved by introducing new, more resistant varieties, and the potato has remained a major dietary staple in Ireland despite the disaster.

Scotland adopted the potato a bit later than Ireland did.  It seems to have spread north from England rather slowly, possibly because the English were reluctant to eat the same thing their barbaric, papist neighbors across the Irish Sea, at least until the growing urban population in 18th century England needed a cheap source of food.  Regardless, potatoes were certainly planted in the Scottish Lowlands by the early 18th century, had made their way as far  north as Stirling by 1739, and are believed to have been first introduced to the Highlands by the MacDonald of Clanranald in 1743.

Potato Flower.  In the mid-18th century, the potato
became very popular at the French court, and Marie
Antoinette wore these in her hair.  

The series of events through which the potato replaced traditional crops in the Highlands was actually eerily similar to what had happened in Ireland a few decades earlier, and we return now to our friend King James II.  When last seen, His Ex-Majesty was in Rome, begging the Pope for money.  There were several half-hearted attempts at restoring the House of Stewart to the British throne, none of which went very far, before one was successful enough to seriously worry the House of Hanover.  In 1745, the late King James's grandson, Charles Edward Stewart, landed in the Highlands with a little money and a few advisers from France, Spain, and Rome.

Bonnie Prince Charlie,
still managing to look
Italian in a tartan suit.
I blame the wig.

The bulk of Bonnie Prince Charlie's support, however, came from the Highlands, where many of the clans supported the Stuart claims to the throne.  Regiments raised by the chiefs of these clans formed the bulk of Charles Stuart's army, and while they did have some early success, lack of funding caused the rising to end after less than one year with the disastrous defeat at Culloden (April 1746).

Prince Charles and a few of the Jacobite lords may have been able to escape the devastation that followed, but the highlanders were not.  In the aftermath of the battle, the English commander, the Duke of Cumberland, began a scorched earth campaign intended to punish the highlanders for the rebellion.  Crops were burnt, landlords and small farmers alike were driven off their land, and the clan system was destroyed.  Things did stabilize again, with new, often English landlords replacing Jacobite chiefs, but these landlords did not see the relationship between laird and tenant the way their predecessors had, so they replaced family farms with more profitable sheep, driving the highlanders onto small plots of poor farmland, as the Irish had been.  The humble potato, originally looked on with suspicion, became a staple out of necessity, just like it had in Ireland, and when a bight destroyed the Irish crops in the 1840's, the same thing happened in the Highlands, also resulting in famine and mass emigration.  Still more moved into the rapidly growing industrial cities further south, like Glasgow.

Victorian London: industry fueled by potatoes.

Things started to stabilize again when the crops stopped failing in the 1850's.  By that time, potatoes were becoming a major food source for city dwellers as well as Irish and Highland farmers, since they took up less space than grains- a boon in crowded Victorian cities- and had a much lower spoilage rate, as well as better nutritional value.  By the 20th century, potatoes had been so thoroughly adopted into the diet of the British Isles that they were beginning to be considered traditional, and are usually one of the two veg you see on any given British dinner plate today.