Introduction

Prior to the nineteenth century, food supplies everywhere were unpredictable and Europe suffered from a succession of subsistence crises. In the words of Fernand Braudel 'cereal yields were poor; two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster.' Such uncertainties of existence were marks of 'the biological ancien régime'. ¹ Braudel's idea was taken up by Professor J.D. Post who called the European-wide dearth of the 1740s the 'last great subsistence crisis' ² even though Europe experienced a widespread shortage of food in 1766, as did Britain in the 1790s (especially 1795–1796), and 1801. Yet Post discounted the acute food shortages in post-Napoleonic Europe during 1816–1817, because he assumed that new techniques being developed in agriculture would lead to increases in the output of crops and numbers of animals. An increased food supply, including imported foodstuffs during the nineteenth century, would result in Europe becoming capable of sustaining population growth. Post's assessment was broadly correct: continent-wide subsistence crises did not appear in Western Europe or North America later than the eighteenth century. After the immediate post-Napoleonic War crisis, famine in nineteenth-century Europe was much more localized, though it was extensive in the northern provinces of European Russia in 1891. ³