Famine in European History

Guido Alfani is Associate Professor of Economic History at Universit... Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. An economic and social historian and an historical demographer, he has published extensively on Early Modern Italy and Europe, specialising in the history of famines and epidemics, in economic inequality, and in social alliance systems. He is the author of Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy: The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2013) and is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project EINITE, 'Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300-1800.' Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor Emeritus of Economics at University College Dublin. He was awarded the Royal Irish Academy's gold medal for the humanities in 2009 and is currently president-elect of the Economic History Association. He has published on topics ranging from the European Little Ice Age and London's last plague epidemics to the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Recent works include Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (2006), Famine: A Short History (2009), and Eating People Is Wrong and Other Essays on the History and Future of Famine (2015).

• 1. Famines in Europe: an overview Guido Alfani and Cormac Ó Gráda; 2. Italy Guido Alfani, Donatella Strangio and Luca Mocarelli; 3. Spain Vicente Perez Moreda; 4. France Gerard Béaur and Jean-Michel Chevet; 5. Germany, Switzerland and Austria Dominik Collet and Daniel Krämer; 6. Low Countries Daniel Curtis, Jessica Dijkman, Thijs Lambrecht and Eric Vanhaute; 7. Britain Richard Hoyle; 8. Ireland Cormac Ó Gráda; 9. Nordic Europe Martin Dribe, Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson; 10. Eastern Europe (Russia and the USSR) Stephen Wheatcroft; 11. The European famines of World War I and II Stephen Wheatcroft and Cormac Ó Gráda.

'A wide-ranging and deeply informed collection of essays on a painful but historically important and fascinating phenomenon: famine in the European past. Covering many centuries and the entire continent, the essays are deeply researched and rely on sensible economic and statistical analysis. Edited by two world-renowned experts, this is one of the best anthologies on any topic in economic history to appear in a long time.' Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University, Illinois