Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 296

This collection of essays offers a comprehensive and systematic history of famine in Europe by eminent experts in this field of research. The introduction and nine regional chapters are followed by the final part, which examines the episodes of famines occurring due to disruptions of food supplies during World Wars I and II or in their immediate wake. The book ends with an extensive bibliography list and index.

Throughout the book, Cormac Ó Gráda’s definition of famine is used: ‘a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases’ (p. 2). Secondly, a common methodology has been defined to be applied to regional reconstructions relying on time series of deaths/burials. There was crisis if the number of deaths exceeded the ‘normal’ (calculated by different methods) by 50 per cent or more. Chapters on England, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and to a lesser extent on Sweden, succeed in combining information on prices with that on deaths for centuries. If price fluctuations and/or mortality response to increases in the price of cereals could not be measured, authors have relied on qualitative data or available historiography (most notably in the chapters on Russia and Germany).

Contributors avoid entanglement with ideological controversies. The editors declare that ‘the two common views of famine – either that they are man-made catastrophes or, instead, that they are the result of inadequate production – should not be seen as conflicting but as complementary’ (p. 3). In a politically sensitive question – that is, whether there was intentional Soviet policy, beyond mere callousness and ruthlessness, behind the Ukrainian and Moldovan famines of the 1930s and 1940s – Stephen Wheatcroft points rather to ignorance and poor judgement that exacerbated the consequences of poor harvests.

The characteristics of European famines were very varied and different causal factors seem to have prevailed in different places and epochs. Severe subsistence crises were mostly triggered by inadequate production but the outcomes were always mediated by human agency and by institutions (pp. 3–4). Famines are ‘extremely complex events’ and the editors rightfully argue that explaining any single famine must take into account the specific context in which it occurred (p. 16).

The volume provides a valuable reconstruction of the chronology of the main events based on rigorous data collection and analysis. The spatial scale at which famines occurred varied enormously between individual famines, and the book mostly focuses on the supra-regional or even ‘continental’ famines. The earlier conclusion about the exceptionality of widespread famines is largely confirmed. The worst famines on the continental as well as the national scale are identified. On the continental scale, the worst crises occurred in 1315–17 and in the last decades of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The eighteenth-century food crises were smaller in scale. In the nineteenth century, the famine of 1845–50 affected a relatively small part of Europe. In making the latter claim, however, the editors seem to jump to conclusions without having carefully studied central and eastern European circumstances.

Nine regional chapters mostly cover the period from the late Middle Ages to when famine ended in each area. Each chapter analyses the scope and the severity of the famines, points out the most important ones, and discusses the characteristics, the consequences and the causes of famine but the latter to different extent. The comprehensiveness varies largely according to the availability of earlier studies as well as of good documentation, a circumstance that places England, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain in a clearly favoured position.

The book presents several general trends, common features and supra-national developments: the links between the occurrence of famine and natural disasters, ecological shocks and changes in climatic trends; changes in the international grain trade; improvements in market integration and transport systems; population dynamics; introduction and spread of new crops, and extensive warfare. Some important aspects like urban/rural and social disparities are, however, largely overlooked. The role played by public institutions in food provisioning is examined but not systematically analysed in all of the individual chapters. Religion and ideology also influenced the stance on relief in various ways and are discussed in some of the individual case-study chapters.

Differences in living standards, the role of rising incomes in reducing vulnerability to famine, and disparity between West and East need more thorough discussion. The editors are aware that the apparent scarcity of famines in eastern Europe does not reflect a condition of better food security but refer to the relative scarcity of information. As a result, countries with higher living standards are relatively better covered. It seems that sudden external shocks are more likely to draw scholarly attention than structural and chronic problems in the under-developed periphery. Wheatcroft points to the question about the comparability of western and eastern European (or Russian) magnitudes of crises where in the latter normal mortality was high and high levels of hunger were normal. In scholarly literature on Tsarist Russia, it remains unclear whether there was an association between the changes in mortality (on the local scale, at least, crisis years, when the number of deaths exceeded the moving average by more than 50 per cent, occurred often in the nineteenth century) and fluctuations in prices or not, and if not, which factors and coping strategies account for that. Wheatcroft argues that the nature of food difficulties was determined by specific geographic conditions.

Finally, a methodological question arises about the scale on which we can evaluate mortality figures in order to talk about famine in a country. Regional differences are a key feature of famines, and for example, Chapter 9 on Sweden analyses county-level data as well. Given the size and ecological and socio-economic diversity of several countries, disaggregating the data to at least provincial or preferably even county level would reveal several episodes of severe crises in these regions. Focusing on magnitude leads to underrating or ignoring famine suffering and mortality effects in regions that were parts of large states (Ireland, however, seems to enjoy a special status in this regard as it has a separate chapter devoted to it), although regionally limited famines could be of very severe intensity or even devastating.

To conclude, this book is a highly ambitious attempt to offer a broad and quantitatively rich picture of famines in many parts of Europe from Late Middle Ages to when they ended, by exploring their scale, characteristics, causes and effects. It is a formidable task and not all contributors have accomplished it with the same degree of completeness. The volume summarizes earlier studies as well as pointing to as yet unexplored areas awaiting further research.