Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 247

The changes in consumption patterns resulting from the European expansion after 1500 were perhaps its most durable consequence. Long after the price revolution had been forgotten and after many of the colonies in the New World had shaken off their colonial ties, European consumption habits were still affected by these ‘exposure effects’. The most dramatic effect on Europe was brought about by the lowly potato. A recent paper by two economists has estimated that the growth of agricultural productivity in Europe attributable solely to the introduction of the potato from America accounted for 18 per cent of the observed post-1700 increase in population growth and 37 per cent of urbanization (Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, ‘Columbus’s contribution to world population and urbanization: a natural experiment examining the introduction of potatoes’, unpublished working paper, Harvard University, 2008). The potato produced up to three times the calories per acre that cereals did, and on soils that were often not suitable for any other kind of arable farming. As a side bonus (unknown to the people at the time), the potato also contained ascorbic acid and other important trace elements that made those who consumed it healthy. Arthur Young, that inveterate observer of crops and farms, noted in the late 1770s of the Irish that ‘when I see their well-formed bodies, their men athletic and their women beautiful, I know not how to believe them subsisting on an unwholesome food’.

Yet the potato carried with it a dreadful risk that was only to be revealed much later. In 1845 a vicious fungus named Phytophthera infestans attacked the potato crops in Europe and, for a number of years the harvest was almost completely wiped out. The food scarcity was compounded by an especially poor rye harvest in 1846. The famine could not have come at a worse time. The mid-1840s were already a period of crisis in rural western Europe because, by that time, the competition of mechanized textile manufacturing had severely cut the income of the workers in cottage industries who subsisted in part on earnings in domestic manufacturing. The crisis would thus have occurred in any event, because home production of cheap textiles was doomed. But those areas where the poor subsisted in part on the collapsing earnings from domestic industry and in part on potatoes were dealt a double whammy in the difficult years from 1845 to 1850. To add injury to injury, many of the regions afflicted by hunger and economic crisis were ravaged by the second cholera outbreak in Europe in 1848–9.

The economic and demographic impact of the potato failure depended on two main determinants: the degree to which diets depended on potatoes and the ability of the economy to come up with substitutes for the potato for the most affected regions at short notice. The failure of cereal crops in Europe did not help, but suffering also depended to a great degree on policy and the approach that governments took to famine relief.

Ireland, in which over three million people depended almost entirely on potatoes for their sustenance, suffered the most, but many other regions in Europe were badly hit. In this collection, a number of scholars from different countries produce comparative essays on the effect of the potato failure on their countries. Ireland, because it was by far the worst-hit nation, has three essays devoted to it, one by co-editor Cormac Ó Gráda, the leading economic historian of Ireland and one of the world’s leading experts on famines in general (see his Famine: a short history, Princeton University Press, 2009). Irish history was altered forever by the famine. As Ó Gráda points out, most pre-industrial famines led to rapid demographic recovery in the years following the famine. Ireland, by contrast, continued after the dreadful shock of the Great Famine to lose population decade after decade until the twentieth century. Here, three elements came together: a heavy dependence on potatoes, especially in the west and south; low levels of commercialization; and a poor infrastructure. To that, we may add the almost fanatical commitment of the Whig government of John Russell to free markets and its desire to ‘reform’ Ireland by teaching it to behave more prudently (as a brief essay by Peter Gray explains). The result was a ghastly excess death toll of about 1.1 million people plus at least another 400,000 averted births.

In most of the other areas affected, the demographic effects were noticeable but not nearly as disastrous. In the Scottish highlands, as Tom Devine points out, dependence on potatoes was lower than in Ireland, and the industrialized and richer parts of Scotland were able to absorb the shock. In Flanders, local authorities were more successful in supporting the starving peasants, although Belgium, too, was fortunate that it had a large modern industrial sector that could mobilize the resources to pay for food imports. In the Netherlands, which had considerable regions heavily dependent on the potato, the effects were palpable, but compared to Ireland they were modest and transitory. In a detailed and well-researched essay, Paping and Tassenaar struggle with a complicated story, in which both rural and urban regions were affected, but the demographic picture is a bit muddled because of outbreaks of malaria and cholera between 1845 and 1850. But here, too, the nation was far less vulnerable than Ireland, because it was considerably wealthier and more commercialized.

Elsewhere in Europe, the potato harvest and the rye harvest failure in 1846 brought a great deal of misery, but not anything that can count as catastrophic. Not everywhere did the potato failure figure prominently in the crisis. Thus, in France, Vivier concludes that the 1846–47 crisis ‘was severe but not exceptional’ and cannot bear the causal responsibility for the overthrow of the July Monarchy. Chevet and Ó Gráda, in an essay significantly entitled ‘Crisis: what crisis?’, fail to see any connection, in France, between production shortfalls and price increases on the one hand and mortality on the other. A fine essay by Hans Bass describes in detail the exact dimensions of the crisis in Prussia, and concludes that distribution was more important than production. Elsewhere in Europe, in Spain and Scandinavia, as essays in the volume explain, the impact of the potato blight was relatively mild.

All in all, this interesting volume illustrates the power of well-done comparative economic history. As in all edited volumes, the contributions are of uneven quality and not always in consensus. The main conclusion is that, as we move away from Ireland, the potato failure declines in its impact. For the historians of Ireland, that conclusion must underline the depth of Irish exceptionalism and the urgent need to explain it better.