Welcome to a CEDAR seminar with Henrik Forsberg and Magnus Bohman!
Henrik Forsberg, Unit of Economic History, Umeå University
Magnus Bohman, Unit of Economic History, Umeå University
Economic and Social History of a European Famine: Comparative Perspectives on Northern European Harvest Failures in the 1860s
Why are some regions more successful in combating famine than others, experiencing different scales or even managing to avoid famine altogether? Our contribution constitutes the introduction chapter to a forthcoming anthology which explores how regions across the Baltic Sea coped with severe food supply issues in the 1860s, with the aim to provide a framework for understanding the regional dynamics of Northern Europe’s last great peacetime famine. The crisis was triggered by extreme weather conditions that caused significant harvest failures. During this transformative period regions were in different stages of development at the crossroads of nation-building, industrialization, and globalization. The said harvest failures exerted pressure on the predominantly rural agricultural societies, although with widely different outcomes.
Previous scholarship of the best-known famine of the period, the Great Finnish Famine of 1866-1868, has often neglected the broader context of regionally diverse harvest failures and famine experiences in adjacent regions as well as their intertwined effects on each other. Our contribution addresses scales of famine in a transnational environment, acknowledging how the regions under investigation were economically and geographically entangled with each other despite them having different state structures.
All interested are welcome to participate. If you want to participate digitally, please contact Mojgan to receive a meeting link.
