Preliminary Programme

The demographic evidence shows plainly that there were two periods of famine in late sixteenth-century England. In much of southern England there were food shortages, high food prices and an outbreak of petty criminality as people stole to eat. In the north and west though there was a heightened mortality. The reasons for these famines have remained largely mysterious. Scattered references to weather conditions in these years have never really been gathered, but this paper introduces a new chronicle source from Shrewsbury which contains detailed descriptions of the weather as experienced in the north-west Midlands. These famine years can now be shown to be the outcome of extreme wet weather. Moreover, the new source describes famine relief efforts. It calls into question the long established view that the cause of famine was overpopulation caused by the sub-division of tenements (a view already questioned by Healey and others) or the proliferation of rural textile industries and hammers a further nail into the increasingly discredited view that early modern European famine served as a Malthusian positive check.
(Show less)

Polish historians rarely devote their attention to the subsistence crises and famines in early modern Poland. They tend to focus on the problems of wartime destruction and diseases, which are still associated strongly with the economic crisis of the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries. Nevertheless, in southern Poland (and probably in other parts of the contemporary Kingdom of Poland) there were at least two great famines during the 18th century: in 1714/1715 and 1736/1737. From this latter until the 1840s there were several less severe subsistence crises; the famine of 1771/1772 which affected Central Europe (Germany, Bohemia, Silesia) was not so acute, for instance. In 1772 this region was occupied by Austria and became one of the poorest provinces of the Habsburg Empire, dominated by a rural population (about 75% in 1880) and a manorial economy based on peasant serfdom. In spite of these circumstances, from the beginning of the Austrian regime until 1846/1847 there were no other such substantial crises caused by harvest failure.
The main problem faced by the scholar is the lack of sufficient statistical data relating to demography, harvests and prices. Some important materials remain scattered (parish registers to the end of the 18th century). Nevertheless, I will try to answer the question about the vulnerability of the rural population to subsistence crises using parish registers above all (fertility, mortality). The paper will be also an attempt to describe the dependencies between the above-mentioned crises and other factors, such as:
- level of production of main crops (using the first land cadastre of 1785/1787, known as the Josephine Cadastre, as well as tithe records);
- the socio-economic structure of the peasant class (division into full farmers and crofters);
- geographical circumstances and causes of harvest failures (e.g. floods).
This paper is a continuation of similar subjects which will be raised in my paper at the Rural History 2015 Conference in Girona (the subsistence crisis of 1846/1847), and they are connected with the papers presented at the 12th International Conference on Urban History in Lisbon in 2014 (urban farming) and the Rural History Conference 2013 in Berne (the introduction of potatoes). (Show less)

This study investigates the effects of weather shocks on social upheaval among African smallholders in British colonial Africa. We collect data from annual administrative records and construct a panel dataset of 151 districts across west, south-central and east Africa in the Interwar Era (1920-1939). Our findings are twofold. First, we establish a robust U-shaped relation between rainfall deviation and annual imprisonment. We argue that the effect runs via harvest failures which increase levels of social tension and distress. Second, we review a long-standing and unsettled debate on the impact of agricultural commercialization on African smallholders’ resilience to weather shocks, and find that areas where smallholders cultivated cash crops experienced lower levels of social upheaval in years of abnormal rainfall. (Show less)

Since the seminal work by McCloskey (1984) a number of studies have dealt with the issue of the presence of carry-over stocks and their commercial vs. non-commercial motivation. A common feature of this scholarship is that is does not directly observe storage behavior of individual producers over successive agricultural years. This study develops a novel approach to this issue on the basis of ledgers of three manorial estates situated in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These sources are used both to track seasonal sales behavior and the volume of carry-over stocks. This information is combined with grain prices of nearby urban markets and with mail correspondence between the landlord and his administrator to situate the behavior of manors between the ideal types of the rational investor vs. paternalistic exchange with their dependents. (Show less)