What caused the rise in food prices in the eighteenth century? Contemporaries often
blamed “hoarders and speculators,” and killed individuals suspected of withholding
grain or fl our from the market. Bad harvests and diffi culties in getting large amounts
of grain from one place to another were more signifi cant factors than the actions of
real or imagined speculators, however. Even more important was a steady growth in
population, especially after mid-century. The slow growth of the European population
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – an increase of about 20 percent over each
century – turned sharply upward, with the population of Europe as a whole nearly
doubling from 1750 to 1850. As in the sixteenth century, more people meant a greater
demand for food, and thus higher prices (see fi gure 31).
This explanation only leads to a second question: why did the population go up?
Historical demographers have analyzed all kinds of records to determine the reasons
for this dramatic upsurge. They studied age at marriage, wondering if people
were marrying earlier, which in an era before effective birth control meant they were
having more children. This was true in a few places, such as England, where in many
areas there were more opportunities for rural women to gain paid employment at a
young age and so start saving money for dowries earlier. England experienced the
fastest demographic growth, with its population tripling, from 5.8 million in 1750 to
16.6 million in 1850. In both England and Europe as a whole, however, declining death
rates were more important than rising birth rates as a cause of population increase.
Why death rates went down – thus making life expectancy go up – is a complicated
question, and historians point to a number of interrelated factors. Though public
health measures such as improving the quality of the water supply and building sewer
systems for waste were less effective than their builders hoped, they did help reduce
outbreaks of typhoid fever, dysentery, and other intestinal diseases. (Intestinal diseases
are the seventh leading cause of death worldwide today, mostly in parts of the world
that continue to lack clean water or adequate sewers.) Draining swamps and marshes
reduced the fl y and mosquito population, which lessened outbreaks of malaria.
Contagious diseases tend to hit infants and children particularly hard, so that the slight
reduction in their occurrence decreased infant and child mortality faster than the mortality
of adults. Improved child-rearing practices, including longer nursing and more
frequent changes in clothing, may have also lessened child mortality.
Most contagious diseases grew only slowly less virulent, but the bubonic plague
disappeared from western and central Europe in the eighteenth century. There were
serious plague epidemics throughout the seventeenth century, including a devastating
outbreak in London in 1665 to 1666 that may have killed more than 100,000 people. An
outbreak in southern France also killed a similar number in 1721, but this was the last
appearance of the plague west of the Ottoman Empire. The cordons sanitaires that had
fi rst been set up around uninfected cities were extended to whole regions. Ships traveling
from Syria or the Ottoman Empire were forced to wait before unloading cargo or
passengers, and the border between Ottoman and Habsburg territories along the Danube
was patrolled with an eye to disease control. Such quarantine measures could not
be foolproof, of course, given the amount of trade and smuggling, but they helped.
Changes in building styles, including wider streets and housing made of brick, stone,
or other sturdy materials that were more diffi cult for rats and other vermin to enter,
may have also helped end the plague and lessen other contagious diseases. In London,
80 percent of the city was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, just a few months after the
plague had died down. Many residents interpreted the conjunction of the two events
as a clear sign of God’s wrath, but the fi re allowed the city to be rebuilt in a slightly less
crowded pattern. Some medical historians have suggested that changes in the nature
of the rat population or in rats’ immunity to the disease may also have played a role in
ending the plague in western Europe. Epidemiologists are not sure why similar changes
did not have the same impact in eastern Europe and the Near East, however, so the
disappearance of the plague remains somewhat of a mystery.
Many contagious diseases, including diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and
measles, remained common, sometimes fl aring up into epidemics that killed thousands
of people. Smallpox proved to be the most deadly of the European diseases carried
to the New World, and remained a killer in Europe throughout the eighteenth
century; the inoculation procedures discussed in chapter 8 were limited to some parts
of the Ottoman Empire and England, and had little impact on the population of Europe
as a whole. Epidemic typhus, a disease spread by fl eas, lice, ticks, and mites, actually
increased in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in
crowded cities and among war refugees.
In addition to a slow decrease in the rates of death from contagious diseases, new
foods and changes in eating patterns may also have increased longevity. Ever larger
fi shing fl eets brought back thousands of tons of fi sh from the Grand Banks of the
Atlantic, which was sold fresh, pickled, salted, and smoked, increasing the amount of
protein in people’s diets. More farm animals meant more meat, especially in northern
Europe, which was already one of the most carnivorous parts of the world. Climatic
conditions improved slightly after a cooling trend in the seventeenth century, which
brought increases in grain production and fewer disastrous harvests. Increased planting
of vegetables, including spinach, asparagus, lettuce, artichokes, peas, and green
beans, helped to vary and enrich people’s diets. Sunfl owers, brought by the Spanish
from South America, joined olives in southern Europe as a source of cooking oil, and
corn (maize), also brought from Mexico, became popular in Spain, Italy, and the Balkans.
During the seventeenth century, Europeans recognized that the tomato, another
New World plant, was not deadly, and began planting it as a food crop as well as a
garden ornamental.
Suspicion of the tomato came in part because of its relationship to deadly nightshade,
a highly poisonous plant, and the most important New World foodstuff was
another relative of nightshade, the potato. Potatoes originated in the Andes, and Spanish
sailors carried – and ate – them on their way back to Europe. There they met great
disdain. Potatoes were not mentioned in the Bible and grew underground, so they were
seen as vaguely demonic, and people hated the way they tasted. Potatoes, like turnips,
were fi ne for animals (and slaves in the New World), but not people in Europe. This
lack of interest changed slowly when people realized they could be grown on extremely
poor soil and were easy to harvest and store; a fi eld planted with potatoes could feed
two or three times the number of people that could be fed by the same fi eld planted
with grain. By the late seventeenth century, potatoes were an important crop in the
Netherlands, Switzerland, and Ireland, where they fed both animals and people. Agricultural
historians estimate that, by 1800, the Irish diet included an average of ten
potatoes per person per day, or 80 percent of people’s caloric intake, not including the
milk, cheese, and meat that came from animals fed on potatoes.
The rulers of Prussia, especially Frederick the Great, recognized potatoes would
grow equally well in the cool summers and sandy soil of Prussia, and ordered farmers
to plant them, as did the kings of Sweden and Norway. The War of the Bavarian
Succession in 1778–9, between Prussia and Austria, has been nicknamed the “Potato
War” because the primary tactic involved gaining the food supply of the opposite
side rather than actual battles, and Prussian troops spent their time harvesting
potatoes. Antoine-Auguste Parmentier (1737–1813), a French army doctor and
agronomist who had been imprisoned by the Prussians during the Seven Years War,
promoted potato cultivation in France, persuading Marie Antoinette, so the story
goes, to wear potato fl owers in her hair and inviting local notables to all-potato dinners.
(There are several soups and side dishes named in his honor, all containing
potatoes.)
Potatoes are actually more nutritious than grain because they have higher vitamin
and mineral content. The potato crop is also more reliable year to year, as it is less likely
to be destroyed by hail, drought, or unexpected early frosts. (Like grain, potatoes are
subject to blight; the worst blight was in the 1840s, which destroyed the crops in many
European countries, most famously in Ireland, where more than a million people died
of famine and disease, and a quarter of a million emigrated.) The harvest is thus more
regular year to year, which evens out the available food supply.
Changes in the nature of warfare may also have reduced death rates. The devastation
of the Thirty Years War led military and political leaders to put more emphasis
on provisioning their troops, which lessened the amount of food and other supplies
that armies would confi scate from the countryside through which they moved.
Armies were larger in the eighteenth century and their weapons were deadlier, but
they were more separated from the civilian population, so that their impact in terms
of the spread of disease and the intentional or accidental killing of civilians was
smaller. Mass migrations because of warfare were fewer in the eighteenth century
than earlier – and non-existent in Britain, which fought no major wars on its own
territory – which meant fewer abandoned fi elds and years in which nothing was
planted.
Historians debate exactly which of these factors – more and different food, better
transport, more land under cultivation, fewer epidemics, improving public health
measures, different patterns of warfare – was the most important, but there is no debate
about the actual trends. Mortality crises, in which death rates shot up for weeks,
months, or years because of famine, disease, or war, decreased in their intensity, so that
the difference between maximum and minimum death rates decreased. Life expectancy
increased slowly and steadily, from twenty-eight to thirty-four in France during
the period 1750 to 1850, thirty-seven to forty in England, and thirty-seven to forty-three
in Sweden.
World History
