Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 274

As Gordon Brown discovered in 2008, however much we try to marginalize ‘exogenous factors’ within our understanding of the economy, they have a habit of coming back to bite us. Given the resultant topicality of concerns about economic crises, this volume of essays provides a welcome reinsertion of the exogenous into historical accounts of economic and social history. The essays range very widely, from environmental crises, to epidemics, to business crises, to industrial problems and decline. Chronologically, they extend from twelfth-century England, early modern Czech lands, nineteenth-century Malta, the late nineteenth-century United States, early twentieth-century Latin America, the so-called ‘oil-shock’ of the 1970s and the Northern Rock debacle in 2007. This is an interesting mix, and it eschews some of the staples of the econometric literature including Tulip-mania, the South-Sea Bubble, the US stock market crashes of 1873 and 1929. This allows the authors to offer new perspectives and new ways of integrating natural phenomena (the two horsemen of famine and pestilence) into accounts of economic change, and in thinking more systematically about the local consequences of man-made economic problems.

Obviously, any such study has to begin by defining the concept of ‘crisis’, given that the subsequent essays apply the term in a number of different ways. The introduction represents something of a missed opportunity in this respect, because it settles for representing all the different ways in which crises might manifest themselves and how they provoke responses. Perhaps it is naive or overly reductive to hope for the formulation of a kind of benchmark, but it would have been very helpful to have a discussion focused on what scale or duration a natural or economic event would need to have in order to stand outside the normal cyclical variations. Such broadly accepted definitions exist in demography to indicate ‘crisis mortality’. Would it have been possible, on the basis of the essays represented here, to posit ‘natural’ crises based on, say, two consecutive years of harvests 50 per cent below the long-term mean; or climatic conditions of two or more years where average seasonal temperatures were 5 or 10 per cent different from the long-term mean; or economic crises that involved two consecutive years in which the money supply contracted, or GDP dropped consistently by more than 1 or 2 per cent?

It would also have been useful if the editors had attempted some kind of conclusion, to draw out common themes. This is particularly pressing, because the essays in this volume point to a compound crisis in later medieval England and Europe, in which climatic abnormality allied to human and bovine/ ovine epidemics, substantial disruption of credit markets, sustained credit contractions, and extreme cyclical variations in international markets. Rather than the (twentieth-century) examples chosen in Singleton’s essay on the possible ways in which a ‘disaster cycle’ of crisis, response and recovery might aid historical explanation, it would have been intellectually stimulating to see this approach applied to considering the two centuries that were required to overcome the cumulative catastrophes of 1310–50. The reader who seeks such answers may need to find them in Bruce Campbell’s newly published magnum opus, The great transition. Climate, disease and society in the late medieval world (CUP, 2016).

Even so, there are some fascinating, and thought-provoking essays in this collection. Mark and Catherine Casson provide a chronology of crises in late medieval England that will undoubtedly form a foundation on which much future scholarship is constructed, a kind of Phelps-Brown and Hopkins index of cyclical economic stress. This has obvious, but slightly underexploited, connections to Nightingale’s chapter on late medieval English credit crises. Philip Slavin’s exciting research on the sheep and cattle diseases that accompanied the Great Famine in early fourteenth-century England, emphasizes how terrible life was for the generation born before the Black Death, and his discussion of recovery strategies links to more general discussions in chapters by John Singleton and Samuel Cohn. The case studies of economic, demographic, financial or industrial crises by Pavla Jirkova (Czech Plague), Josette Duncan (nineteenth-century Malta), Anne Murphy (Bank of England in the 1780s), John Lee (late medieval English cloth trade), Cinzia Lorandini (nineteenth-century Tyrolean silk industry), Peter Bent (1890s US tariff debates), and Alan Knight (Latin American Great Depression), each offer well-worked considerations of the role of exceptional change in provoking responses or initiating decline.

However, the chapter that illustrated the fertility of this attempt to integrate the exogenous shock into existing market-based historical interpretations was John Martin’s account of the international crisis of 1972–77. Martin’s analysis refutes the explanation of the inflationary spiral of the 1970s as a consequence of the ‘oil shock’ after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He embeds these events in two long-term climatic anomalies: a series of abnormally dry summers in the southern hemisphere in 1971 and 1972, followed by ones in the northern hemisphere in 1975 and 1976. The former also produced El Niño effects in 1970–71 reducing the South American anchoveta harvest, and the supply of fish-meal fertilizer. The latter drove the Soviet Union onto world grain markets as a buyer at the moment when the main world market supplier, the US, suffered a significant harvest fall (as it had in 1972). Similar problems were seen in the production of staple crops such as potatoes, sugar beet, and a shortage of livestock fodder after the dry summer of 1976. Rising oil prices and industrial problems in many western countries exacerbated these movements but they did not cause them. ‘Exogenous factors’ did, and Martin remarks, may well do again, if the predictions of climate scientists about man-made climate change are realized.

Martin’s essay illustrates the way that crises can compound each other, and how the abnormal and the ‘non-economic’ can (and should) be incorporated into historical interpretations. As noted, the essays deserved a slightly stronger interpretative introduction, and (in particular) something by way of synthesis in conclusion. However, this volume is very valuable in puncturing the endogamous supply-and-demand, rational market bubble in which much economic history still resides.