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The last great subsistence crisis in the western world
230
REVIEWS
In many respects Dr Parker’s book is like his sources. He apologizes for an “austere and impersonal” first half, and indeed the reader is swamped with a mass of seemingly ill-digested (and sometimes apparently irrelevant) facts and figures. Many of these numbers could have been abstracted from the text, summarized in tables, and placed in an appendix. Further, Dr Parker seems unwilling to stray beyond the bounds imposed by his sources into areas that are necessarily speculative, though perhaps more interesting. Why, for example, did Lord Leicester invest some E58,OOOin the South Sea Company of which he was to lose some &38,000? What was Coke’s attitude to the farm labourer? Dr Parker tantalizes us by suggesting that much propaganda was to counter criticisms of the “social effects of his style of management” (p. 81) but does not elaborate. One wonders how Coke regarded Castle Acre, almost wholly owned by him yet one of the most notorious “open villages” of the nineteenth century. Taken strictly on its own terms the book is a useful if unadventurous account of one of the largest agricultural estates in the country. It also has, like the estate records on which it is based, some minor points of more general interest. We hear how Lord Leicester borrowed small sums of money from many of the inhabitants of west Norfolk, thereby acting as a sort of savings bank for the small investor (p. 33). On the agricultural side Dr Parker shows how inferences drawn from late eighteenth-century enclosure acts can be misleading (p. 43), and that a comparison of Arthur Young’s comments on a Holkham estate farm with the actual records of that farm leads to the conclusion that Young confused what was happening with what he felt ought to be happening (p, 116). Emmanuel College, Cambridge
MARK OVERTON
JOHN D. POST, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Pp. xv+ 240. $12.95) The years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars were marked by a serious economic crisis in the western world. Calamitous weather, acute food shortages, violent price fluctuations, famine rumours, public disturbances and migrations disrupted postwar recovery in most parts of Europe. Concomitantly, there appeared a major typhus epidemic in the British Isles, the Italian peninsula and the Alpine region, and an outbreak of epidemic bubonic plague in south-eastern and Mediterranean Europe. Interaction between climate, socio-economic, epidemiological and political factors spawned an unrelieved sequence of riots and looting of such magnitude as to require military force for pacification. Elevated and compounded social and political tensions negated the liberal ideas of 1815 and solidified political and economic conservatism. The mechanism which intensified a recession already in progress, caused by economic disrupttions inherent in rapid demobilization and monetary contraction, was an abrupt perturbation in weather induced by abnormal volcanic activity. In 1815, a major volcanic eruption lowered the atmospheric transparency of the air for the next few years. Tomboro on Sumbawa Island sprang to life and with the largest and most destructive explosion in modern time, blew 150 km9 of volcanic ash and pulverized rock high into the stratosphere. People all over the world felt the effects of this natural catastrophe. Suspended volcanic dust prevented sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface and lowered temperatures world-wide for several years. Temperatures for the summer months of 1816 in the English Midlands ranged from a -2.3 “F deviation for May to a -4.6 “F deviation for July from the 1698-1952 average. Edinburgh recorded abnormally low temperature readings (below those in England) and in Ireland one observer reported that the mean temperatures of spring, summer and autumn were 34 “F lower than the preceding year. Weather at Ghent in Flanders was cold and wet with snow and sleet until mid-May. Records from other places in Europe conlirm these patterns. Most alarming to many rural inhabitants in the western world
REVIEWS
231
were the strange fogs and dust veils, coloured or tinted rains, brown, red, yellow, bluish or flesh-coloured snow, along with intense, devastating autumn and winter blizzards. John D. Post, an associate professor of history at Northeastern University, has written a stimulating book on the relationship between anomalous weather patterns and downswings and contractions in the 1816-1819 trade cycle. He argues that the 1816-1819 economic crisis owed its unusually great scope not to the newer economic forces-industrialization and improved commercial and monetary communicationbut to fluctuations in agricultural productivity. Post believes that the extra-economic “shocks” which dislocated the western economy were meteorological in nature, and that an interaction between economic and climatic fluctuations, rather than political decisions, led to the disruption of commodity market relationships and to social upheavals. The term “subsistence crisis” refers to the social consequences of doubled or tripled cereal prices that produced, more through high costs than through absolute shortage, conditions ranging from scarcity to deaths from starvation. This study focuses primarily on the second decade of the nineteenth century, but the author considers that his findings apply to other economic crises of the past and will apply to future events. Professor Post contends that the subsistence crisis of 1816-17 was the worst European famine (?) since 1709-10, and that the western world has never again experienced a food crisis of such extensive range. Western society was still unsettled and had not recovered from the effects of war. Political reorganization and economic stagnation, combined with postwar economic competition and disrupted trade patterns, created serious dislocation for continental industries. Unemployment was dramatically increased by the appearance in the labour market of several million men released from the armed services. Twenty-five years of war, taxation, requisitions and plunder led to general national impoverishment on the Continent. Added to the purely economic woes, the shortfall of cereal production drove bread prices beyond even those employed at standard wage levels. Cereal prices, according to Post, provide the best insight into the plight of most north Europeans, for bread expenses claimed at least half a working family’s income in normal times. When rumours of deficient grain harvests were received by grain merchants and bakers, bread prices soared. Bread prices in France, Austria and Germany doubled between 1814 and 1817; in the Netherlands prices increased two to three times ; in Wiirttemberg and Baden rye bread had quadrupled in price by late 1817; and in Switzerland bread prices increased four to five times. American bread grain prices doubled, reflecting lower domestic grain production and increased European demands. Imperial Russia, Europe’s saviour from oppression a few years earlier, became Europe’s liberator from an all-encompassing famine. Statistics on the number of people who starved to death and of those who died from epidemic disease are not precise, but Post estimates that at least 200,000 deaths were related to the ramifications of a harvest failure and a postwar trade cycle. Post’s discussion of the events which led up to the trade cycle is fascinating, exasperating and disturbing. His emphasis is on the Labrousse thesis that harvest failure led to a reduction in the demand for industrial goods; that power to purchase goods and services was transferred from many small farmers to a few large grain producers; that agriculturalists over-reacted to inflated grain prices by expanding grain production ; and that the eventual excessive agricultural surpluses induced a price collapse which benefited no one. No maps, diagrams, charts or photographs are included in Post’s book. His notes are good, but his bibliography is deficient. He is unfamiliar with the food-famine literature of the western world. His bibliography has serious voids in classic hunger-famine studies written in many languages, and was compiled, primarily, in the early 1970s. The author makes an excellent job of describing events but not of explaining those events. He introduces a myriad of hypotheses, many needing statistical testing, and
232
REVIEWS
few scientifically proven or disproven. Post never defines the critical terms used throughout his work. Most disturbing is his use of the word famine. This term is complex and researchers have struggled to provide a definition that is applicable to all incidences of acute starvation on a massive scale. If Post had utilized any acceptable definition, such as “a protracted shortage of total food in a restricted geographical area, causing widespread disease and death from starvation”, he would not have stated that famines had occurred in various places where the literature fails to record them. Had he examined the literature on famines, he would have discovered that all famines are a result of many causes. Most famine cycles begin with a crop failure, but a crop failure is not equivalent to a famine. Nature produces a crop failure; man, by withholding food from his fellow man by one means or another, creates a famine. Famines are also silent deaths. Disorder, riots and rebellion are not normally associated with a true famine situation nor is concern for the price of bread. Famine is the total lack of food for an extended period of time. Those who are part of a famine slowly starve to death and have little strength to rebel. Post claims that the 1816-17 food crisis, the last great subsistence crisis, took approximately 200,000 lives. If it were the last, how would one describe or classify the Irish Famine of 1846-7 in which perhaps l,OOO,OOO perished, the Imperial Russian famine of 1891-2 which claimed 650,000 lives and some of the famines of Soviet Russia? Post has produced a very controversial piece of work. He has employed a synthesizing approach to interdisciplinary history and has used this approach effectively. He is critical of historians who use the fragmental approach of national history, but his is nevertheless a temporal rather than a spatial study. One could speculate on the outcome of Post’s writing efforts had he been trained in historical geography, historical climatology and the geography of food and famine. Post, a historian, judiciously analyses an environmental calamity of hemispheric proportions which had repercussions on the political, social and economic events of a dozen or so countries. His work places the occurrences in the post-Napoleonic era in a new perspective. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World is a well-written, exciting book. It will be of particular interest to historians and economists who specialize in the post-Napoleonic era, to geographers who have interest in human ecology and to scholars in general European political science, demography and agriculture. University of North Dakota
JACK SIMMONS, The
WILLIAM A. DANDO
Railway in England and Wales 1830-1914, Vol. 1, The System and its Working (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978. Pp. 295. f 12.00) Railway history tends to be written with passion or scholarship, but all too rarely with a balanced mixture of the two. There is no shortage of raw material, but much of the surviving documentation is official and impersonal, a cold record of decisions with no discussion of policy and little hint of motives and consequences. To breathe life into this material, to perceive the wood through the mass of minutely detailed trees, is a daunting and demanding task. It is hard enough at the level of local area or company history: studies of the quality of C. L. Mowat’s The Golden Valley Railway (1964) are the more precious by their rarity. To view the whole British railway system and its economic and social impact in a way which is neither superficial or anecdotal poses a challenge which few have tackled and in which still fewer have succeeded. Two favourites have long pointed the way, Jack Simmons’s The Railways of Britain: An Historical Zntroduction (1961) and Michael Robbins’s The Railway Age (1962), though the latter, its author modestly declared, is not a history of railways but a “longish essay” on railway history. The present work bodes fair to be an even more successful attempt. Jack Simmons claimed that his earlier book was “intended very literally to provide an introduction
REVIEWS
In many respects Dr Parker’s book is like his sources. He apologizes for an “austere and impersonal” first half, and indeed the reader is swamped with a mass of seemingly ill-digested (and sometimes apparently irrelevant) facts and figures. Many of these numbers could have been abstracted from the text, summarized in tables, and placed in an appendix. Further, Dr Parker seems unwilling to stray beyond the bounds imposed by his sources into areas that are necessarily speculative, though perhaps more interesting. Why, for example, did Lord Leicester invest some E58,OOOin the South Sea Company of which he was to lose some &38,000? What was Coke’s attitude to the farm labourer? Dr Parker tantalizes us by suggesting that much propaganda was to counter criticisms of the “social effects of his style of management” (p. 81) but does not elaborate. One wonders how Coke regarded Castle Acre, almost wholly owned by him yet one of the most notorious “open villages” of the nineteenth century. Taken strictly on its own terms the book is a useful if unadventurous account of one of the largest agricultural estates in the country. It also has, like the estate records on which it is based, some minor points of more general interest. We hear how Lord Leicester borrowed small sums of money from many of the inhabitants of west Norfolk, thereby acting as a sort of savings bank for the small investor (p. 33). On the agricultural side Dr Parker shows how inferences drawn from late eighteenth-century enclosure acts can be misleading (p. 43), and that a comparison of Arthur Young’s comments on a Holkham estate farm with the actual records of that farm leads to the conclusion that Young confused what was happening with what he felt ought to be happening (p, 116). Emmanuel College, Cambridge
MARK OVERTON
JOHN D. POST, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Pp. xv+ 240. $12.95) The years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars were marked by a serious economic crisis in the western world. Calamitous weather, acute food shortages, violent price fluctuations, famine rumours, public disturbances and migrations disrupted postwar recovery in most parts of Europe. Concomitantly, there appeared a major typhus epidemic in the British Isles, the Italian peninsula and the Alpine region, and an outbreak of epidemic bubonic plague in south-eastern and Mediterranean Europe. Interaction between climate, socio-economic, epidemiological and political factors spawned an unrelieved sequence of riots and looting of such magnitude as to require military force for pacification. Elevated and compounded social and political tensions negated the liberal ideas of 1815 and solidified political and economic conservatism. The mechanism which intensified a recession already in progress, caused by economic disrupttions inherent in rapid demobilization and monetary contraction, was an abrupt perturbation in weather induced by abnormal volcanic activity. In 1815, a major volcanic eruption lowered the atmospheric transparency of the air for the next few years. Tomboro on Sumbawa Island sprang to life and with the largest and most destructive explosion in modern time, blew 150 km9 of volcanic ash and pulverized rock high into the stratosphere. People all over the world felt the effects of this natural catastrophe. Suspended volcanic dust prevented sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface and lowered temperatures world-wide for several years. Temperatures for the summer months of 1816 in the English Midlands ranged from a -2.3 “F deviation for May to a -4.6 “F deviation for July from the 1698-1952 average. Edinburgh recorded abnormally low temperature readings (below those in England) and in Ireland one observer reported that the mean temperatures of spring, summer and autumn were 34 “F lower than the preceding year. Weather at Ghent in Flanders was cold and wet with snow and sleet until mid-May. Records from other places in Europe conlirm these patterns. Most alarming to many rural inhabitants in the western world
REVIEWS
231
were the strange fogs and dust veils, coloured or tinted rains, brown, red, yellow, bluish or flesh-coloured snow, along with intense, devastating autumn and winter blizzards. John D. Post, an associate professor of history at Northeastern University, has written a stimulating book on the relationship between anomalous weather patterns and downswings and contractions in the 1816-1819 trade cycle. He argues that the 1816-1819 economic crisis owed its unusually great scope not to the newer economic forces-industrialization and improved commercial and monetary communicationbut to fluctuations in agricultural productivity. Post believes that the extra-economic “shocks” which dislocated the western economy were meteorological in nature, and that an interaction between economic and climatic fluctuations, rather than political decisions, led to the disruption of commodity market relationships and to social upheavals. The term “subsistence crisis” refers to the social consequences of doubled or tripled cereal prices that produced, more through high costs than through absolute shortage, conditions ranging from scarcity to deaths from starvation. This study focuses primarily on the second decade of the nineteenth century, but the author considers that his findings apply to other economic crises of the past and will apply to future events. Professor Post contends that the subsistence crisis of 1816-17 was the worst European famine (?) since 1709-10, and that the western world has never again experienced a food crisis of such extensive range. Western society was still unsettled and had not recovered from the effects of war. Political reorganization and economic stagnation, combined with postwar economic competition and disrupted trade patterns, created serious dislocation for continental industries. Unemployment was dramatically increased by the appearance in the labour market of several million men released from the armed services. Twenty-five years of war, taxation, requisitions and plunder led to general national impoverishment on the Continent. Added to the purely economic woes, the shortfall of cereal production drove bread prices beyond even those employed at standard wage levels. Cereal prices, according to Post, provide the best insight into the plight of most north Europeans, for bread expenses claimed at least half a working family’s income in normal times. When rumours of deficient grain harvests were received by grain merchants and bakers, bread prices soared. Bread prices in France, Austria and Germany doubled between 1814 and 1817; in the Netherlands prices increased two to three times ; in Wiirttemberg and Baden rye bread had quadrupled in price by late 1817; and in Switzerland bread prices increased four to five times. American bread grain prices doubled, reflecting lower domestic grain production and increased European demands. Imperial Russia, Europe’s saviour from oppression a few years earlier, became Europe’s liberator from an all-encompassing famine. Statistics on the number of people who starved to death and of those who died from epidemic disease are not precise, but Post estimates that at least 200,000 deaths were related to the ramifications of a harvest failure and a postwar trade cycle. Post’s discussion of the events which led up to the trade cycle is fascinating, exasperating and disturbing. His emphasis is on the Labrousse thesis that harvest failure led to a reduction in the demand for industrial goods; that power to purchase goods and services was transferred from many small farmers to a few large grain producers; that agriculturalists over-reacted to inflated grain prices by expanding grain production ; and that the eventual excessive agricultural surpluses induced a price collapse which benefited no one. No maps, diagrams, charts or photographs are included in Post’s book. His notes are good, but his bibliography is deficient. He is unfamiliar with the food-famine literature of the western world. His bibliography has serious voids in classic hunger-famine studies written in many languages, and was compiled, primarily, in the early 1970s. The author makes an excellent job of describing events but not of explaining those events. He introduces a myriad of hypotheses, many needing statistical testing, and
232
REVIEWS
few scientifically proven or disproven. Post never defines the critical terms used throughout his work. Most disturbing is his use of the word famine. This term is complex and researchers have struggled to provide a definition that is applicable to all incidences of acute starvation on a massive scale. If Post had utilized any acceptable definition, such as “a protracted shortage of total food in a restricted geographical area, causing widespread disease and death from starvation”, he would not have stated that famines had occurred in various places where the literature fails to record them. Had he examined the literature on famines, he would have discovered that all famines are a result of many causes. Most famine cycles begin with a crop failure, but a crop failure is not equivalent to a famine. Nature produces a crop failure; man, by withholding food from his fellow man by one means or another, creates a famine. Famines are also silent deaths. Disorder, riots and rebellion are not normally associated with a true famine situation nor is concern for the price of bread. Famine is the total lack of food for an extended period of time. Those who are part of a famine slowly starve to death and have little strength to rebel. Post claims that the 1816-17 food crisis, the last great subsistence crisis, took approximately 200,000 lives. If it were the last, how would one describe or classify the Irish Famine of 1846-7 in which perhaps l,OOO,OOO perished, the Imperial Russian famine of 1891-2 which claimed 650,000 lives and some of the famines of Soviet Russia? Post has produced a very controversial piece of work. He has employed a synthesizing approach to interdisciplinary history and has used this approach effectively. He is critical of historians who use the fragmental approach of national history, but his is nevertheless a temporal rather than a spatial study. One could speculate on the outcome of Post’s writing efforts had he been trained in historical geography, historical climatology and the geography of food and famine. Post, a historian, judiciously analyses an environmental calamity of hemispheric proportions which had repercussions on the political, social and economic events of a dozen or so countries. His work places the occurrences in the post-Napoleonic era in a new perspective. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World is a well-written, exciting book. It will be of particular interest to historians and economists who specialize in the post-Napoleonic era, to geographers who have interest in human ecology and to scholars in general European political science, demography and agriculture. University of North Dakota
JACK SIMMONS, The
WILLIAM A. DANDO
Railway in England and Wales 1830-1914, Vol. 1, The System and its Working (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978. Pp. 295. f 12.00) Railway history tends to be written with passion or scholarship, but all too rarely with a balanced mixture of the two. There is no shortage of raw material, but much of the surviving documentation is official and impersonal, a cold record of decisions with no discussion of policy and little hint of motives and consequences. To breathe life into this material, to perceive the wood through the mass of minutely detailed trees, is a daunting and demanding task. It is hard enough at the level of local area or company history: studies of the quality of C. L. Mowat’s The Golden Valley Railway (1964) are the more precious by their rarity. To view the whole British railway system and its economic and social impact in a way which is neither superficial or anecdotal poses a challenge which few have tackled and in which still fewer have succeeded. Two favourites have long pointed the way, Jack Simmons’s The Railways of Britain: An Historical Zntroduction (1961) and Michael Robbins’s The Railway Age (1962), though the latter, its author modestly declared, is not a history of railways but a “longish essay” on railway history. The present work bodes fair to be an even more successful attempt. Jack Simmons claimed that his earlier book was “intended very literally to provide an introduction