The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
Food Policy and Applied Nutrition Program
DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 14
Emergency Relief during Europe’s Famine of 1817
Anticipated Responses to Today’s Humanitarian Disasters
Patrick Webb
September 2002
Corresponding Author: [email protected]
Discussion papers provide a means for researchers, students and professionals to share
thoughts and findings on a wide range of topics relating to food, hunger, agriculture
and nutrition. They contain preliminary material and are circulated prior to a formal
peer review in order to stimulate discussion and critical comment. Some working
papers will eventually be published and their content may be revised based on
feedback received.
The views presented in these papers do not represent official views of the School. The
discussion paper series is available on line at
http://nutrition.tufts.edu/publications/fpan/. Please submit drafts for consideration as
FPAN Discussion Papers to [email protected].
2
Abstract
Humanitarian professionals continue to seek best practice guidelines for famine relief.
Many emergency interventions in developing countries draw on recent lessons from the
20th century, but attention has also been paid to historical experiences such as the 19th
century evolution of India’s Famine Codes and responses to Ireland’s famine of the 1840s.
This article goes further back in time to examine public responses to the pan-European
famine of 1816/17. It finds that many of the experimental actions set in place at that time
contributed to a growing public acceptance of the role of government action in times of
crisis, while establishing a variety of viable approaches that continue to be used today.
Key words: Famine, history, Europe, public action.
3
INTRODUCTION
Two years after the battle at Waterloo much of Europe was facing famine. The
aftermath of protracted conflict was marked by columns of refugees, some heading east
into Russia (where food was still plentiful), while others moved westwards to escape to
the Americas by ship. In Germany and Switzerland people were eating cats, rats, grass
and straw. In Italy, beggars flocked to cities, while in England demobilised soldiers
and unemployed farmhands lined up to join food-for-work activities. Hundreds of
thousands of Europeans died from the combined effects of typhus, exposure and
starvation.
This paper focuses on the little-known crisis of 1817 since it offers useful insights into
the evolution of public action among now-industrialised nations. Prior to the 1800s
much debate on emergency relief was less concerned with how to react than with
whether to react at all. Writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1) argued that “it is
quite a good thing that a certain number of people should get killed now and then” in
the interests of population control. Similarly, many economists agreed that emergency
relief was both ineffective and misguided. According to Malthus (2), for example,
relief of the poor “relieves them for a short time, but leaves them afterwards in a
condition worse than before”, while Ricardo (3), argued that funds raised for
employing destitute people were wastefully diverted from “other productive
employment.”
After the 1817 crisis, however, most European nations began (albeit slowly) to
acknowledge that governments have a responsibility (beyond economics) to protect all
citizens, not just favoured groups, and that this sometimes requires direct public
intervention into failed markets (4,5). Recognition of the need for safety nets and
specialised relief agencies did not come about overnight, nor did it translate into
practice quickly enough to prevent mass suffering later in the century in Ireland and
India (6,7). Nevertheless, the implementation of relief operations on a massive scale
across most of pre-industrial Europe did help broker acceptance of the idea that poor
people should be safeguarded against famine (and perhaps even chronic hunger)
4
through appropriate policies and institutions in good years, as well as bad.
The first section of this paper briefly outlines the scale of the pan-European crisis that
was a precursor to the great Irish Famine three decades later. A second section
examines the variety of public responses that were mobilized to counter the crisis. The
conclusions draw lessons from 1817, highlighting a number of changes in the
principles and practice of relief that can be traced to that time.
A POST-CONFLICT FOOD CRISIS
As with all famines, Europe’s post-Napoleonic crisis did not emerge full-blown
overnight. The crisis was born of a combination of multiple harvest failures (the most
precipitous decline in production since the mid-1700s), coupled with a rapid erosion of
purchasing power among the poor who faced a loss of income coupled with rising food
prices (8, 9).1 On the one hand, harvests were poor in many parts of Europe. From
1813 through 1815 harvests were generally lower than expected in many countries,
largely due to a strong El Nino ‘warm event’ which caused droughts in some regions
and floods in others (10). However, 1816 was truly calamitous for most of the
continent—a year “without summer” in most high latitude temperate zones as a result
of volcanic dust blanketing high altitudes after a major volcanic eruption in 1815 in
Indonesia (11). Heavy rains during spring months were followed by snow in June and
July causing widespread harvest failures. Wheat yields in England, Ireland and France
were at least 75 percent lower than the recent norm.
On the other hand, the roots of famine lay in the winding down of the war. Some
regions were politically shattered by the conflict--not only parts of France but also
regions that had frequently changed hands, such as the Saarland and Wuerttemburg in
Germany and parts of northern Italy. Some provinces or principalities disappeared
altogether through amalgamation, governments changed in others. Economic
depression set in as military demobilisation accompanied a decline in manufacturing
1
Post’s seminal research on the epidemiological implications of historical European famines is
gratefully acknowledged here.
5
output and exports (12). Poverty grew rapidly in some regions and food markets were
poorly connected across national boundaries.
The effect of the crisis on food prices is reflected in Table 1. This shows the index of
wholesale wheat and rye prices (set at 100 for 1815) roughly doubling in 1817 in many
countries. The worst affected area was southern Germany where prices increased fourfold within 12 months, the peak occurring from May through July of 1817. Such rapid
and extreme instability in the price of basic foods resulted in a consumption crisis
manifest from Scotland to Sicily. The human impact was recorded by many
contemporaries. Eye-witnesses wrote of starving people on the Swiss-German border
baking ‘bread’ from straw and sawdust (13); some Bavarians ate their own horses and
watch-dogs; in Hungary and parts of northern Switzerland locals ate rotting cereals and
carrion meat (14); and the number of beggars reached “unmanageable proportions” in
Italy and Ireland (15).
Some families tried to escape the deprivation by becoming refugees. In 1817, a series
of convoys of bullock-drawn wagons left Ulm in southern Germany carrying around
8,000 people on their way east to Tiflis (now in Georgia). Invited by the Tsar of
Russia to colonize his newly-conquered regions in the Caucuses, many households
took their chances going eastwards rather than seeking to travel to the Americas.
Unfortunately, disease accounted for more than a third of the Ulm refugees before they
reached their destination (12). Not long after that 2,200 people left Freiburg (in
southwest Germany), this time to found a colony in Brazil—to be named Neu Freiburg.
By 1820, only 800 of them were still alive.
Among those who stayed behind, a lack of food compounded by epidemic disease
caused widespread mortality. In eastern Prussia, where grain prices rose the least
among major European states, gross mortality increased during 1817 by only 6 percent,
versus a rise of more than 20 percent in parts of southern Germany (15). For example,
the principality of Wuerttenberg recorded 3,000 more deaths than births in 1817,
compared with a natural increase of 15,000 a mere 2 years later. There were also more
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deaths than births recorded in Switzerland in both 1817 and 1818. In Lombardy (then
part of the Hapbsburg empire), the crude death rate reached 5 per 10,000 in 1817; in
Tuscany the figure exceeded 5, and in Bologna the official death rate rose by 80
percent to reach 8 deaths per 10,000 (15)2.
PUBLIC INTERVENTIONS
The divergence in mortality rates across Europe is explained not only by varying
degrees of severity of the famine (reflected in harvest levels and food prices), but also
by differences in the effectiveness of public intervention, both prior to, and during the
crisis. Public health conditions and diet were already poor in remoter regions of
Switzerland, Ireland and large parts of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and
effective responses to the crisis were limited. For example, one physician explicitly
blamed high famine deaths in Ireland on “the low conditions of bodily health arising
from the deficiency and bad quality of the food.”(16) Indeed, some alpine and Italian
regions under Habsburg control suffered seriously high levels of scurvy and pellagra
even before the famine set in (15). By contrast, epidemic disease and related famine
mortality were relatively lower in countries with an established tradition of public
health investments and strong local administration (as well as more creative
approaches to famine relief intervention), such as Prussia, the Netherlands and England
(4,12).
Table 2 offers an overview of the various interventions implemented in different
European countries to counter the famine. Most countries adopted a mixture of food
supply and price control policies coupled with various direct transfer-based
interventions. For example, Prussia, France, Prussia, and the Netherlands all imported
whatever grain they could secure even at high world market prices, much of it from
Egypt, Russia and the United States of America.3 Indeed, the increased European
demand for wheat flour caused the price in U.S. cities to rise from an average of US
2
For the sake of comparison a rate of 12 per 10,000 was reported during the worst of the Ethiopian
famine of the mid-1980s.
3
It is an historical irony that food shipments to meet a food crisis in Europe were sent from countries
that themselves received considerable food aid from Europe in the late 20th Century.
7
$8.57 per 100 pounds in 1816 to $11.72 the following year (17). This helped U.S.
grain exports to more than double their value during 1817, reaching a total of $23
million. These food shipments to Europe were paid for partly by governments out of
state funds, partly through public subscriptions. The French and Prussian
administrations spent huge sums imports with the result that bread prices stabilised and
fell fairly quickly in 1817; other regions imported in smaller quantities (such as BadenWuerttemburg and Bavaria), and these supplies had a less than desired impact on food
availability or prices (15).
Some countries sought to control food supply by prohibiting (or levying prohibitive
duties on) grain exports from their borders. This policy was based on the assumption
that keeping available food within a country would alleviate the problem. However,
this rarely had the planned effect. On the one hand, the export ban (imposed in
southern Germany, for example), did not make food more accessible to the local poor
who still had no purchasing power. On the other hand, the control of food movement
even across internal borders often resulted in greater hardship for locales hardest hit by
harvest failure--when other parts of the same country may have had a nominal surplus
to share. For example, export embargoes established by individual Swiss cantons
made it difficult to move grain from the lowlands to the remote mountainous regions;
the latter had to make up food deficits through imports from elsewhere at much higher
cost. As a result, St. Gall and Appenzell faced mass starvation while bread prices in
Basel did not even increase after January 1817 (15).
Little of the food under public control was distributed free. Typically only ‘indigent’
people (too destitute or sick to be able to care for themselves) were supported through
gratuitous relief in the form of food offered through systems of workhouses and
almshouses. Such ‘poor law’ provisions were already well established (and widely
supported by churches and private charities) in the United Kingdom, France, the
Netherlands and Prussia, but were limited in scope in Italy, or the Habsburg domains.
In the latter cases cash grants were distributed to the poor, but usually only in small
quantities far short of needs.
8
Where bread or soup was distributed through ad hoc shelters and camps for the
destitute other problems often arose. For example, typhus fever was rapidly spread
through close-quarter living in camps set up “for the distribution of soup among the
poor where multitudes were crowded together—many [coming] from infested houses.”
(16). It was also noted that many people died from well-meaning, but too rapid a refeeding regimen: “after supporting for some time a miserable existence, on scarcely
anything but boiled nettles and other herbs, their organs became impaired, and when
too late assisted by better food, they could not digest it; their extremities swelled, and
they perished in a few days.” (14).
An alternative model was established in northern Germany’s larger city states.
Starting in Elberfeld in 1816, many cities set up Kornvereine (grain associations or
cooperatives) that purchased grains overseas themselves without going through state or
national channels (18). These associations were underwritten by wealthy townspeople
who raised funds in the private sector and used defined merchants to negotiate the
delivery of food directly to their town halls (mainly from Russia via the Baltic ports).
Vereine members purchased ‘tokens’ from the membership secretariat for the purchase
of bread at subsidised prices. By 1817, cities such as Koln, Coblenz, Frankfurt, and
Duesseldorf had all adopted this innovative model.
A more widely adopted measure was the injection of public food stocks into key
markets at subsidised prices with a view to stabilising prices. This was seen in much of
France, as well as in Belgium, and parts of Italy. Municipal subsidies were also
common in Belgium and France such that urban bread prices were kept even lower
than those in rural areas—a step taken to minimise the risk of urban food rioting. In
southern Germany, and parts of Switzerland, food stocks were not just dumped into
selected markets but sold directly to bakeries at highly subsidised prices so that the
bakers could offer bread to consumers at a lower price (15).
Some countries pursued other forms of direct intervention, particularly in the form of
9
labour-intensive public works set up in Switzerland, Prussia, the Habsburg Empire and
Switzerland, and especially in the United Kingdom. In 1817, a new Poor Employment
Act was adopted which allowed the British government to provide large sums of money
from the treasury as loans (at 5 percent interest) to corporations or private individuals who
would invest them in projects employing large numbers of daily labourers. Within 2
months, more than 100 applications had been made for over 1 million pounds sterling.
These projects focused on building canals and roads and draining of marsh lands--the
foundations of the Industrial Revolution. Workers were sometimes paid in cash, but often
in bread and grains (5).
From that time on public works became a regular feature not only of British welfare
policy, but also of economic policy (5). While the welfare objective was met by
addressing mass unemployment, the economic development goal was met first, through
the increased liquidity made available during crises (bank credit and individual purchasing
power), and secondly through investments in specific large-scale works that had failed to
attract capital on the open market. Thus, while the 1817 act was seen as a temporary
measure at the time it remained in place (renewed several times), until the New Poor Law
of 1842 when public works were institutionalised alongside other means of welfare
assistance (6,19).
CONCLUSIONS: A RESPONSIBILITY FOR PUBLIC ACTION
Emergency interventions during the famine of 1817 met with varying degrees of
success, partly determined by prior conditions and partly by the level of commitment
of government and municipal authorities to the prevention of mass suffering. Even
where responses were efficient most public actions were in effect reactions—often too
little, too late. Few were based on pre-existing policies, institutions or lines of finance,
largely because the principle of public responsibility for combating hunger had yet to
be widely accepted.4
4
It could be argued that there were precedents in the relief activities in Russia under Peter I between
1721 and 1724. However, those relied on hastily improvised, piecemeal public works and free grain
10
That said, many of the actions and ideas that came into being often as ‘temporary’
initiatives were institutionalised during the decades that followed. It may be that some
governments responded to the famine less out of humanitarian concerns than out of a
fear of re-awakening the revolutionary tendencies that had ignited the Napoleonic
period in the first place (15). However, even if that were true many philosophical and
political currents were already changing in the post-conflict era, and these were
accelerated during the crisis (12). The right of every individual to be free from
starvation, and the responsibility of government in that regard, became increasingly
difficult to ignore. Lessons were learned in terms of the role of the media in bearing
witness to suffering, the important niche activities of charitable organisations, the
potential for employment creation as a means of addressing hunger, and the relevance
of investing in future development through relief operations.
What is more, the attention of policy makers and welfare planners began to shift after
1817 from trying to cope with ‘mass hunger’ towards trying to address the specific
needs of individuals during ‘normal’ times, not only during crises. Meeting nutritional
needs slowly supplanted ‘a lack of food’ as the operational parameter of relief design,
even where cash was the preferred intervention resource. While concern among
economists about potential disruption of the ‘normal’ functioning of markets remained
(and remains) strong, parallel attention has grown to the potential disruption by crises
of peoples’ own lives, livelihoods and diets.
Discussion of how best to invest in a nation’s own people increasingly became the
norm as the Victorian era progressed. In the United Kingdom, progressive adaptation
of ancient Poor Laws and the abolition of protectionist Corn Laws served to underline
the shift in public thinking. New social safety nets were elaborated, often including
protection against food price volatility and availability, and longer-term welfare
mechanisms (insurance, pensions, tax incentives targeted to the poor). It was these
principles that eventually served as building blocks for famine prevention and relief
during the colonial period.
distribution that was neither institutionalised nor fully supported by central government (20).
11
While reluctance to act in the face of human distress can certainly still be found today,
but it is no longer so easily tolerated by public opinion or professional standards of
conduct, and relief responses are not longer acceptable as afterthoughts to welfare. For
the lives and rights of the poor to be safeguarded during times of crisis—those lives
and rights must be protected during times of peace and wealth. The gradual adoption
of minimum living standards for all members of society, enshrined in constitutions and
legally upheld by government, was at least in part facilitated by experiences gained in
responding to the last pan-European famine of 1817.
12
References
1. Rousseau, J-J. cit. Russell, B. (1945) A History of Western Philosophy. Simon
and Schuster, New York, NY.
2. Malthus, T. (1817) Evidence before the Select committee on Emigration from the
United Kingdom, 1827. Parliamentary Papers, 1827. Volume V. Public Records
Office, London, United Kingdom.
3. Ricardo, D. (1817) Letter to Malthus. Works and Correspondence, VII. cit. Sraffa
A. 1955. Malthus on Public Works. Economic Journal. LXV: 542-3
4. Stern, W. M. (1950) United Kingdom Public Expenditure by Votes of Supply,
1793-1817. Economica. 5: 196-210.
5. Flinn, M.W. (1961) The Poor Employment Act of 1817. Economic History
Review. XIV: 82-92.
6. Corry, B.A. (1958) The theory of the economic effects of government expenditure
in English classical political economy. Economica. XXV: 34-48.
7. Davis, M. ( 2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of
the Third World. Verso, London, United Kingdom.
8. Post, J.D. (1974) A Study in Meteorological and Trade cycle History: The
Economic Crisis following the Napoleonic Wars. Journal of Economic History.
XXXIV: 315-49.
9. Post, J.D. (1983) Climatic Change and Subsistence Crises. Journal of
Interdisciplinary History. 14: 153-60.
10. Quinn, W.H., V.T. Neal, S.E. Antunez de Mayolo. (1987) El Niño occurrences
over the past four and a half centuries. Journal of Geophysics Research. 92 (14):
449-461.
11. Trager, J. (1997) The Food Chronology. Henry Holt and Company, New York,
NY.
12. Johnson, P. 1991. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830.
HarperCollins, New York, NY.
13. Raffles, T. (1818) Letters, during a Tour of Some Parts of France, Savoy,
Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands in the Summer of 1817. Liverpool.
Royal Geographical Society, Manuscripts Collection, London, United Kingdom.
14. Simond, L. (1822) Switzerland, or a Journal of a Tour and Residence in that
Country, in the Years 1817, 1818 and, 1819. Boston. Volume 1. Royal
Geographical Society, Manuscripts Collection, London, United Kingdom.
15. Post, J.D. (1976) Famine, Mortality, and Epidemic Disease in the Process of
Modernization. Economic History Review. 29: 14-37
16. Harty, W. (1820) An Historic Sketch of the Causes, Progress, Extent and Mortality
of the Contagious Fever Epidemic in Ireland during the Years 1817, 1818 and
1819. Dublin. Royal Geographical Society, Manuscripts Collection, London,
United Kingdom.
17. United States Department of Commerce/Bureau of the Census. (1960) Historical
Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957. Social Science Research
Council, Washington, DC.
18. Benzenberg, J.F. (1819) Ueber Handel und Gewerbe, Steuren und Zoelle.
13
Elberfeld. Hohenheim University Library, Stuttgart, Germany.
19. Sraffa, A. (1955) Malthus on Public Works. Economic Journal. LXV: 542-3
20. Robbins, R.G. Jnr (1975) Famine in Russia 1891-1892. Columbia University
Press, New York, NY.
14
Table 1: Indices of Wholesale Grain Prices for Selected European Cities, 1816-1819
(1815=100)
1816
1817
1818
1819
Antwerp
138
200
155
105
Utrecht
133
221
156
111
Vienna
188
183
52
30
Munich
190
301
131
n.a
Leipzig
157
198
138
87
____________________________________________________
Source: Adapted from Post (1976).
15
Figure 1: Overview of European Relief Interventions, 1816-1818
___________________________________________________________________
Food
Free
Export
Price
Public
Bakery
Imports
Food
Control
Control
Works
Subsidies
Prussia
Prussia
*
*
Prussia
*
Italy
*
Italy
Italy
Italy
*
*
*
*
Habsburg
Habsburg
*
*
UK
*
UK
UK
*
France
France
France
France
France
*
Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland
*
Switzerland
*
*
Belgium
*
Belgium
Belgium
*
Bavaira
*
Bavaria
Bavaria
*
Bavaria
Baden/W
*
Baden/W
Baden/W
*
Baden/W
Holland
Holland
*
Holland
*
*
___________________________________________________________________
Source: Adapted from Flinn (1961), Post (1976), Johnson (1991).
•
•
= not applicable or not applied on a large scale.
‘Baden/W’ refers to Baden and/or Wuerrtemburg, two German states that are
today combined into one.