Famine

The world of 1600 was intimately familiar with famine. People will have read or heard about it through ancient texts and scripture. They will have heard of the Lord of Hosts visiting upon those in Jerusalem who had not gone into exile in Babylon, 'sword, famine, and pestilence', making them 'like vile figs that are so rotten they cannot be eaten'. There were famines in France, too, ravaged as it was by civil war. The Iberian Peninsular suffered endemic dearth and starvation from the late 1580s through the 1590s, while Sicily and Naples groaned under famine from 1590 to 1592. Famines were not a colonial invention, but they may have got more deadly, and perhaps even more frequent under the British, at least until the twentieth century. Social dislocation probably contributed, too: as Osamu Saito points out for eighteenth-century Japan, famine greatly enlarged the 'floating population', and men became separated from their wives.