Del i serien Routledge Explorations in Economic History

Economic and Social History of a European Famine

Comparative Perspectives on Northern European Harvest Failures in the 1860s

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

3 089 kr

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Why do efforts to combat hunger succeed in some regions but fail in others? History offers many examples of agricultural societies facing severe harvest failures and subsequent food shortages, yet with strikingly different outcomes. In some regions, crop failure triggered catastrophic famine and mass mortality; elsewhere, communities managed to compensate for losses and avoided famine altogether, or endured shortages with only limited consequences.This book compares how regions around the Baltic Sea responded to severe food supply crises during the late 1860s. The decade provides a revealing historical laboratory in which states and regions confronted similar shortages but from very different levels of economic, social, and political development. Scholarship on the best-known crisis of the period, the Great Finnish Famine of 1866–1868, has often overlooked the broader context of simultaneous harvest failures and subsistence crises in neighboring regions, as well as the connections between them.Adopting a transnational and regionally comparative perspective, this volume examines famine as an entangled crisis across the Baltic Sea Area. Although harvest failures and food shortages affected much of the area, famine was far from universal. Through regional analyses of agricultural production, politics, demography, and market interactions within and across state boundaries—including Finland, Sweden, Estonia, northern Germany, and northwestern Russia—the book offers a new, broader and more historically integrated account of food crises in Northern Europe during a formative period.This volume is valuable to researchers and students of European economic and social history, particularly those interested in famine, demography, regional studies, and rural history.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-11-09
Mått156 x 234 x undefined mm
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieRoutledge Explorations in Economic History
Antal sidor304
FörlagTaylor & Francis Ltd
ISBN9781032891736

Tillhör följande kategorier

Mikroekonomi inom Ekonomi och Ledarskap
Ekonomisk historia inom Ekonomi och Ledarskap
Europas historia inom Historia och arkeologi
Geografi inom Naturvetenskap och teknik

Henrik Forsberg (DSS) is an economic and social historian and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on famine, crises, and mnemohistory in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Northern Europe, with particular expertise in Finland, Sweden, and Ireland.Magnus Bohman is an Associate Professor of Economic History and Landscape Science at Kristianstad University, Sweden. His research focuses mainly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Swedish rural history in a comparative European perspective, with particular emphasis on how societies have coped with different kinds of stressors.

Introduction: comparative perspectives on Northern European harvest failures in the 1860s. 2. Weather and climate in the 1860s. 3. Russia and the Baltic food crises of the late 1860s. 4. Germany's last food crisis (1867/68): Food insecurity at the crossroads of industrialisation, globalisation and state growth. 5. The great famine in the 1860s in Finland: the process and actions. 6. Crisis management based on modern flow of information. Autumn of 1867: racing against time. 7. Crisis management based on modern flow of information. Winter of 1867–1868: trying to cope. 8. Impact of the 1860s famine on fertility and mortality in rural Finland. 9. The demographics of the 1860s famine in Västerbotten, Northern Sweden. 10. Crisis on the local level: the case of rural Burträsk 1851–1875. 11. Nature, markets or governance? Understanding the hunger crisis in Dalsland, western Sweden 1868–1870. 12. Extreme weather, extreme deprivation? Regional patterns of the famine in the Russian Baltic provinces, 1867–69. 13. Regional diversity and famine: Gulf of Bothnia in the 1860s. 14. Baltic island communities in times of dearth in the late 1860s: vulnerable vs resilient areas. 15. An integrated understanding of the 1860s famine: a concluding discussion. Index.