The Transformation of the World (45 page)

The eruption of Tambora had global consequences. In many parts of Europe and North America, 1815 was the coldest and wettest year since records began, and 1816 went down in the annals as the “year without a summer.” The impact was most severe in New England and western Canada. But Germany, France, the Netherlands, Britain, and Ireland also recorded abnormal weather conditions and poor harvests. For several more years particles in the stratosphere blocked the sun's rays, causing average temperatures to fall by three to four degrees Celsius. Nowhere did the crisis bite harder than in the southern Rhineland and Switzerland in the winter of 1816–17. Even the basic supply of imported grain broke down, since early frosts and harsh weather delayed shipments from Baltic ports. All of the old syndrome of food shortages, rising prices, and depressed demand for nonagrarian products established its hold. People flocked from crisis areas toward Russia and the Habsburg Empire, or via Dutch ports to the New World. Captains refused to accept penniless refugees, and many who were turned away had to make their way back home as beggars. The acute central European agrarian crisis of 1815–17 has often been seen as one of the last of “the old type,” and quite a few historians have even thought that it destabilized European governments. Historians and climate researchers finally came to recognize in the twentieth century that it had been triggered by events in faraway Indonesia.
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Hydraulics

Water disasters lie at one extreme on the scale of events in which human activity is a contributory fact. They depend on the amount of periodic rainfall and snowmelt and are therefore difficult to predict even today, yet many societies learned early on to regulate the flow of water. Although few Asiatic societies can be said to have had a fully “hydraulic” character, it remains true that in many parts of the world, agriculture and other types of cultivation are possible only on the basis of irrigation and flood-defense technologies that go back a long way in time. The nineteenth century gave a new impetus to hydraulic engineering: it permitted major projects such as those regulating the upper and lower Rhine, or the great canals in North America and central Europe, and later in Egypt and Central America. In some cases, technological breakthroughs allowed new irrigation systems to be created out of ancient installations: for example, the massive projects initiated in the 1860s in the Bombay hinterland.
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From 1885 on, in another project that took years to complete, the government of British India modernized and expanded a system of hydraulic installations in the Punjab (in today's Pakistan) going back to the time of the Mogul rulers. In this way, even the high plains of northwestern India were turned into wheat fields. Laborers were recruited from far and wide, and shepherds were replaced with taxpaying farmers reliable in their political loyalty to the colonial power.
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Sensitive irrigation systems—which require constant attention to work at their peak of efficiency—can be slowly degraded if private interests get out of hand and prevail over regulation in the common good.
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War can destroy them in next to no time, as it did in Mesopotamia in the thirteenth century. The worst disasters occur where dams or dikes collapse—a constant danger not only in protected coastal areas but also on a number of great rivers. Such incidents were likeliest in China, the classical country of premodern water taming. Researchers have used the ample documentation on tax exemptions for flood victims to estimate the scale of the damage along the Yellow River (Huanghe), China's most difficult. For centuries a system of ever higher dikes guided the Yellow River through the provinces of Henan and Shandong, but the dangers of collapse also grew over time. In 1855 the northern dam in Henan gave way. The backwaters of gigantic floods could be seen three hundred kilometers away. And although the authorities deployed more than 100,000 men at the point of fracture, they were unable to hold the river again. After 361 years China's second-largest river altered its course for the sixth time in recorded history, now flowing northeast instead of southeast, so that its new mouth lay three hundred kilometers from the previous one.

In comparison with the catastrophe of 1938, when the Chinese high command blew up the Yellow River dikes in the face of advancing Japanese troops, the floods of the nineteenth century claimed surprisingly few lives. This was because the Qing state was then still capable of operating a kind of early warning system and, at many places, of maintaining protective dikes below the level of the main dams. Nevertheless, it was not unusual for many people to drown or lose their home in the escaping waters of the Yellow River, and floods often brought famine and disease in their wake. In some cases as many as 2.7 million people—7 percent of the population in the province of Shandong—received official disaster aid after dike breaches of the 1880s and 1890s. Social tensions, looting, and unrest were frequent consequences. In one region notorious for its banditry, in which the Taiping and Nian rebels had been active and sections of the population had been formed into armed militias, it did not take long for law and order to break down. Natural disasters alone seldom trigger social protest directly, but they were invariably a contributory factor in drought-prone northern China.
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Floods there were not “manmade disasters” in any platitudinous sense of the term. The engineering challenges were enormous by any conceivable measure, as were those relating to work organization and project funding. The dike bureaucracy, the largest branch of the Qing state in the nineteenth century, concentrated many skills and discharged many tasks competently, but it was hobbled by its growing corruption, fiscal weakness, lack of planning, a tendency to act reactively rather than preventively, and resistance to new technologies.
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All in all, the old basic patterns changed little in the nineteenth century. In principle they still apply today. Owing to the bounty of nature, everyday life held fewer dangers for Europeans than for people in many parts of Asia. Although
the capacity for government regulation was not noticeably different (no state in the world had as much experience as China in dealing with natural disasters), and although a massive impulse was required even in the West to galvanize the state (as the example of the American locusts showed), things were easier for Europeans when push came to shove: more resources could be concentrated on a small number of less serious cases. Nevertheless, the victims of a disaster generally had to fend for themselves or to rely on help from the narrow circle of people around them. Neither medical/humanitarian assistance nor international support entered the picture in the nineteenth century. Both have developed in the period since 1950. They presuppose the deployment of airlifts and a conception of international aid as an ethical principle within a nascent global society—one of the greatest advances of civilization in the contemporary world.

6 Famine

The extent to which famines are “man-made” is not something that can be determined in general. Nor is it easy to say what the “starvation” associated with a famine actually is. The difficulty is twofold: on the one hand, starvation is “culturally constructed,” so that the word does not mean the same at every time and place; on the other hand, the question arises as to what must be taken into account, apart from human physiology and culturally specific “semantics,” in order to reach a reasonably complete understanding of the existential state of “starvation.” One big question therefore turns into a number of subquestions concerning: (1) the
quantity
of food—that is, the minimum of calories—necessary for people differentiated by age and gender; (2) the
quality
of nourishment required to ward off dangerous deficiencies; (3) the regularity and
dependability
of food grown at home or supplied through public distribution or the market; (4) the actual form and level of
distribution
according to social stratum; (5) the claims and
entitlements
to food associated with various positions in society; and (6) the
famine relief
institutions, whether governmental or private-philanthropic, that can be mobilized in an emergency.

The Last Famines (for the Time Being) in Europe

One simple distinction is the one between chronic starvation (long-term shortage of food) and acute famine with a high level of mortality.
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Famine crises were more characteristic of the twentieth century than the nineteenth. The century of great medical advances and the doubling of life expectancy was also the one of the greatest famines known to man: in the Soviet Union in 1921–22 and 1932–34, Bengal in 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941–42, Leningrad during the siege by German troops in 1941–44, the Netherlands in the winter of 1944–45, China in 1959–61, and Sudan in 1984–85. The effects of starvation are the same across cultures: people of all age groups—but first the very young and very old—eat ever-smaller quantities of less and less nourishing food: grass, tree bark,
unclean animals. They become “all skin and bones.” Secondary effects such as scurvy are almost inevitable, especially where people (as in Ireland) are used to a vitamin-rich diet. The struggle for survival destroys social or even family ties, pitting neighbor against neighbor. Men and women commit suicide, children are sold, defenseless people are attacked by animals; cannibalism itself—however unreliable the reports always are—lies in a straight line from despair. Survivors are traumatized, children suffer lasting physical damage, and governments, bearing the original guilt of having failed to provide relief, are often discredited for decades. Memories stick in the collective mind.

Were there such famines in the nineteenth century, and if so, where? The question is rarely mentioned in the history textbooks. The German texts recall the terrible times of the Thirty Years' War, especially 1637 and 1638, as well as the great famine of 1771–72. Hunger again stalked the country in 1816 and 1817. After the subsistence crisis of 1846–47, the classic famine—brought on by harvest failure, grain profiteering, and inadequate government action—disappeared from the history of central Europe and Italy (where things were especially grim in 1846–47).
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Of course, this needs to be seen in a broader framework: famine had marked many parts of Europe in the age of the Napoleonic wars; and hunger riots had broken out in England during the 1790s, even though it was then the richest country in Europe and had the best system of poor relief (the Poor Law) supported by religious and philanthropic private initiative. Few actually starved to death in England, but many of the things to which people were accustomed became prohibitively expensive. Those who could no longer afford wheat turned to barley, while those who found even that too expensive had to make do with potatoes and turnips. Women and children went short more than others, in order to maintain the laboring power of the head of the family. Household goods were pawned, and the number of thefts shot up. Such was the face of hunger in a country that after 1800, thanks to its wealth and its global connections, would be able to ensure its food supply from overseas.
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On the Continent, the specter of subsistence crises retreated after 1816–17. In some parts of Europe where famine had been a regular occurrence, it became much more of an exception—in the Balkans after the 1780s, for example. Spain remained vulnerable and in 1856–57 experienced another major crisis. And Finland lost 100,000 of its 1.6 million inhabitants after the harvest failure of 1867—the last true subsistence crisis in Europe west of Russia.
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At the same time, and in similar weather conditions, Sweden's northernmost province, Norbotten, suffered a serious food bottleneck, although its much better organized disaster relief meant that the loss of life was much smaller than in Finland.
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Scotland—unlike France, for instance—came through the eighteenth century rather well. But between 1846 and 1855 it endured hardship unparalleled since 1690, with year after year of poor potato crops in the western highlands and islands. The loss of life was not especially large, but it fueled massive emigration and was therefore of great demographic significance. It was the last great subsistence crisis in the British Isles.
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Europe's Exceptions: Ireland and the Tsarist Empire

In Ireland, the poorest part of the United Kingdom, the Great Famine of 1845–49 was caused by several years of potato crop failure resulting from the mysterious fungus
Phytophthora infectans
.
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The potato blight hit a society in which the poor lacked not so much food as adequate clothing, housing, and education. English visitors described in dark hues the impoverishment of the island before the famine; they could hardly have failed to do so, given that they came as aristocrats and bourgeois from a country where living standards were twice as high. But, to keep a sense of perspective, we should bear in mind that Ireland's real per capita income in 1840 was equivalent to that of Finland in the same year, Greece in 1870, Russia in 1890—or Zaire in 1970.

The size of the potato harvest in 1845 was one-third smaller than normal, and in 1846 three-quarters smaller. The situation was a little better in 1847, but in 1848 it was scarcely possible to speak of a crop at all. The Irish famine, more than many others, was unleashed by the direct physical failure of the food supply. High prices and speculation, the usual triggers of early modern hunger revolts, played no significant role. The scale of the disaster becomes clearer by the criterion of land acreage of potatoes: two million acres before the famine, a mere quarter of a million in 1847. The death toll peaked in 1847–48, when dysentery and typhus ravaged an already weakened population and tens of thousands were dying in poorhouses, while at the same time the birthrate plummeted. Not only the poor were affected, since no one was safe from infectious diseases. As so often was the case in nineteenth-century epidemics, doctors succumbed too, in droves. Present-day research confirms the old figure of one million excess deaths in a total population of 8.5 million before the onset of the crisis. Perhaps a further 100,000 died of the consequences of starvation, either during or immediately after emigration.