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2018 | Buch

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Famines During the ʻLittle Ice Ageʼ (1300-1800)

Socionatural Entanglements in Premodern Societies

herausgegeben von: Dr. Dominik Collet, Dr. Maximilian Schuh

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Über dieses Buch

This highly interdisciplinary book studies historical famines as an interface of nature and culture. It will bring together researchers from the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities. With reference to recent interdisciplinary concepts (disaster studies, vulnerability studies, environmental history) it will examine, how the dominant opposition of natural and cultural factors can be overcome. Such an integrated approach includes the "archives of nature" as well as "archives of man". It challenges deterministic models of human-environment interaction and replaces them with a dynamic, historicising approach. As a result it provides a fresh perspective on the entanglement of climate and culture in past societies.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Introduction

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Famines: At the Interface of Nature and Society

Abstract

Famines have re-entered public consciousness. While most research focuses on modern and future crises, the past offers a rich and largely untapped archive of societies that have already faced similar challenges. However, current research is characterized by antagonisms of the natural sciences and the humanities. In this paper we argue for an integration of the ‘archives of nature’ and the ‘archives of man’. We survey emerging interdisciplinary research designs (vulnerability studies, social ecology, disaster studies) that facilitate such an approach and contend that due to their unique scope, famines constitute an excellent ‘boundary object’ to study socionatural entanglements. Examining the famines of the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300–1800) can therefore overcome socially or environmentally determinist models of human-environment interaction. As a result, the research approach presented here, can advance our understanding of how past societies dealt with natural challenges and improve the basis for future decision making.

Dominik Collet, Maximilian Schuh

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Frontmatter

Chapter 2. The European Mortality Crises of 1346–52 and Advent of the Little Ice Age

Abstract

Between 1315 and 1352 populations in first northern, then southern and finally the whole of Europe succumbed to a succession of devastating mortality crises. These derived from a common episode of climatic instability generated by global processes of climate reorganisation. From the 1330s, climate forcing grew in strength until between 1342 and 1353 all parts of Eurasia were experiencing exceptional levels of environmental stress. This was the context for the poor harvest of 1346 in northern Europe and failed harvest of that same year in southern Europe, plus concurrent arrival of plague in the Crimea following is long westward migration from its reservoir region in the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau of western China. In Europe the human impact of this conjuncture of climatic and biological extremes was amplified by escalating warfare and onset of a severe commercial recession. The notorious mortality crises of 1346–52 thus emerge as a multi-causal and multi-dimensional disaster.

Bruce M. S. Campbell

Chapter 3. Combining Written and Tree-Ring Evidence to Trace Past Food Crises: A Case Study from Finland

Abstract

The lack of written source material on population and food availability has hindered studies on medieval and early modern food crises in many parts of the world. Examining the case of sixteenth and seventeenth century Finland, this article explores how indirect evidence—so called proxy data—could be used to identify past food crises. The proxies of past climate, grain harvest, storage capacity and population variability were derived from tree-ring studies and early administrative accounts. Evidence from “natural” and written archives supplemented each other. The applicability and limitations of using proxy data to trace past food crises is further discussed by comparing the examples of the sixteenth and seventeenth century to the better documented famine period of the 1860s. It was found that tree-ring data and early administrative accounts provides valuable material to identify past food crises.

Heli Huhtamaa

Socionatural Entanglements

Frontmatter

Chapter 4. Two Decades of Crisis: Famine and Dearth During the 1480s and 1490s in Western and Central Europe

Abstract

During the 1480s and 1490s, parts of Western and Central Europe were hit by subsistence crises. This paper examines both crises by analysing narrative sources, sources derived from administrative processes, and grain price series. During both crises, the Low Countries were affected the most severely; the Holy Roman Empire and parts of modern Switzerland suffered less, even though the dearth was evident there as well. In both cases, the subsistence crises were followed by epidemic diseases. Several factors caused the crises, which can be attributed either to food availability decline (FAD) theories, such as back-to-back harvest failures, or food entitlement decline (FED) theories, amongst them market failures or the unequal distribution of goods within society. The crises of the 1480s and 1490s show characteristics that belong to both the FAD and the FED theories.

Chantal Camenisch

Chapter 5. Climate and Famines in the Czech Lands Prior to AD 1500: Possible Interconnections in a European Context

Abstract

This paper addresses the three most disastrous famine episodes in the Czech Lands before AD 1500—the 1280s, 1310s and 1430s—and analyses them in both meteorological and socio-political terms. Adverse weather anomalies with harmful hydro-meteorological extremes and difficult socio-economic conditions were prerequisites for famine episodes, just as in the rest of Europe. Although times of famine occurrence and the states of the societies vary from country to country, a cascade of key phenomena are generally common to all: (a) complicated socio-political situations (including wars); (b) accumulation of adverse weather patterns influencing agricultural production; (c) severe-to-catastrophic failures of key agricultural crops (particularly grain) for at least two successive years; (d) direct consequences (dramatic increases in the prices of key foodstuffs; famine; consumption of poor-quality substitute diets and thus increases in vulnerability to illness; spread of disease; sharp rises in human mortality; villages abandoned; severe increases in crime).

Rudolf Brázdil, Oldřich Kotyza, Martin Bauch

Chapter 6. Food Insecurity and Political Instability in the Southern Red Sea Region During the ‘Little Ice Age,’ 1650–1840

Abstract

The Southern Red Sea Region (SRSR) is an environmentally unified geographic area whose natural features historically supported a closely-linked, multifaceted socio-economic. The SRSR is currently divided between Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia (Somaliland), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan. In the seventeenth century, the SRSR entered a two-hundred-years-long mega-drought that precipitated a protracted food crisis. Since states traditionally played key roles in the redistribution of food resources in the SRSR, this food crisis resulted in a region-wide political crisis at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Centralized states in Sudan and Ethiopia collapsed. The Yemeni Imamate lost control of the rural countryside. In Arabia, the drought facilitated the first Saudi-Wahhabi military conquest of Ottoman territory, which resulted in the first period of Saudi-Wahhabi control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This far reaching political crisis fundamentally changed the SRSR socio-economic system.

Steven Serels

Coping

Frontmatter

Chapter 7. The Role of Climate and Famine in the Medieval Eastern Expansion

Abstract

Competing concepts and multiple models of medieval expansion to the northeastern frontiers of Central Europe and the internal colonization of the continent have been discussed intensely in scholarship. Everett Lee’s classical theory of migration has offered concepts determining push- and pull-factors for the migrations. However, modern theories of imperial colonization cannot explain the colonization of Eastern Europe by settlers introducing Germanic law. In many cases, the normative sources only confirm the existing conditions of the settlers’ area of origin, but do not mention the new settlements, leaving much room for interpretation and speculation. Narrative sources are abundantly available across all regions, and provide broad chronological coverage of events for the years between 1150 and 1250. Medieval art offers the possibility to illustrate and visualize aspects between man, nature, environment, and people on the move. Analyzing the records of daily life and consumption, the Dorfschöppenbücher provide information on important dietary habits and working conditions of countrymen in East-central Europe regarding the climate. Paleo-climatic evidence sheds further light on the transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age.

Andreas Rüther

Chapter 8. Famines in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Test for an Advanced Economy

Abstract

This article analyzes how the advanced economies of Medieval and Early Modern Italy attempted to cope with famines. First, it provides an overview of the occurrence of famines and food shortages in Italy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, underlining the connections with overall climatic and demographic trends. Second, it focuses on the 1590s famine (the worst to affect Italy in this period), providing a general discussion and interpretation of its causes and characteristics as well as describing and evaluating the strategies for coping with the crisis that were developed within the Republic of Genoa and the Duchy of Ferrara. The article argues that when such a large-scale food crisis as that of the 1590s occurred, public action played a key role in providing relief.

Guido Alfani

Chapter 9. Bread for the Poor: Poor Relief and the Mitigation of the Food Crises of the 1590s and the 1690s in Berkel, Holland

Abstract

This contribution discusses a historical example of what in the field of disaster studies is referred to as a community-based system for hazard mitigation: it examines the role of formal poor relief in the village of Berkel (Holland) during the food crises of the years 1595–1598 and 1698–1700. A detailed examination of the activities of the two main relief institutions in the village during these crises shows that the poor relief system in Berkel performed surprisingly well, despite its fragmented character: not only did it not break down, but in both periods under examination it contributed materially to the mitigation of the impact of the crisis. The main factor explaining this success was the solid financial basis of the larger of the two relief institutions, which not only allowed it to respond to raised demand with relative ease, but also to act as ‘relief provider of last resort’.

Jessica Dijkman

Chapter 10. Educationalizing Hunger. Dealing with the Famine of 1770/71 in Zurich

Abstract

When Zurich in 1770/1771 was hit by a famine, the affected communities adapted various strategies to cope. Whereas local communities focused on survival, the local pastors and parts of the enlightened elite understood the famine as a chance to further their agenda of moral reform and interpreted the events as divine punishment. As a result, only moral education was credited with the ability to overcome the famine. Other factors such as agro-economic decline, the burden of taxes and levies or the cumbersome system of three-field crop rotation received less attention. Consequently the famine initiated educational reform rather than socio-political change. The paper argues that this educationalization of hunger helped the enlightened elite to secure its ruling position until the collapse of the Ancien Régime.

Andrea De Vincenti

Perceiving and Remembering

Frontmatter

Chapter 11. Starvation Under Carolingian Rule. The Famine of 779 and the Annales Regni Francorum

Abstract

How vulnerable was the Frankish society to famines in the Early Middle Ages? Modern concepts of vulnerability and resilience are mainly used to describe susceptibility of present day social and ecological systems to climate change. Since vulnerability and resilience have also become key concepts in famine studies, this paper approaches these concepts as a method to analyze natural impacts and cultural reactions on a historical level. Examining historiographical and administrative documents from the eighth and ninth century as well as dendrochronological data, the paper discusses potential natural impacts, preventive and coping strategies in case of a famine dated to 779. Following this approach, insights into Carolingian exposure to famines are provided, shedding light on early medieval interrelations of nature and culture.

Stephan Ebert

Chapter 12. Staging the Return to Normality. Socio-cultural Coping Strategies with the Crisis of 1816/1817

Abstract

After the subsistence crisis of 1816/1817 in Central Europe a new festival was invented and celebrated all over southern Germany: The parade of the first harvest carriage. This paper analyses the parade in Stuttgart, using articles published in the newspapers and contemporary prints. The parades and their illustrations represent interlocking media that offered symbolic socio-cultural coping mechanisms. In order to trace their effects, theories of intermediality (Rajewsky) and cultural memory (Assmann) are applied. These festivities enabled media consumers to process the closure of the crisis.

Maren Schulz

Chapter 13. Remembering Hunger. Museums and the Material Culture of Famine

Abstract

Famine has been the constant companion of human civilization. Its physical and emotional force resulted in a broad material record that offers a largely untapped archive for famine research. The paper traces the material culture of famine from Ancient Egypt to the modern age. It presents the wide range of objects—from the Osiris sarcophagus, to early modern medals and modern caricature—and debates how they embody the changing modes of perceiving, commemorating and dealing with famine. As it follows the changing emphasis on climate, religion and politics apparent in these objects, it argues for the inclusion of these tangible remains of famine into both museological and scientific practice.

Andrea Fadani

Titel: Famines During the ʻLittle Ice Ageʼ (1300-1800)
herausgegeben von: Dr. Dominik Collet
Dr. Maximilian Schuh
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-54337-6
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54341-3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54337-6