Research project Disentangling socio-political and climatic factors for famines in early modern Europe

The interdisciplinary project “Disentangling socio-political and climatic factors for food insecurity in early modern Europe (c. 1500–1800)” aims to systematically investigate which combination of factors made societies in northern Europe, from the 16th to the 18th century, more or less vulnerable to food insecurity and famine.

Our main question is to what extent food shortages and famines can be explained by socio-political and climatic factors, respectively, and how these factors interacted with each other. To answer these questions, we will embrace a novel, holistic, and integrated approach to combine both data from historical written sources (like grain prices and tithe tax records) and natural palaeoclimatic archives (like tree-ring records) in a number of different studies (articles).

The project is among the first of its kind using both data and methods, in an integrated way, from historical scholarship and palaeoclimatology to address problems, at a larger geographical scale, related to food insecurity and famine in early modern Europe. By combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, we jointly study the direct and indirect impacts of climate variability on harvest yields and the socio-political/socio-economic vulnerability to food insecurity in a number of selected case study regions across northern Europe.

Previously, the scholarship has to a large extent been fragmented between studies within the natural sciences focusing on the impacts of climate variability on food security and studies within the humanities and social sciences focusing on the causes rooted in human agency behind food shortages and famines. This project overcomes the ‘antagonism’ between the humanities and natural sciences that have characterised historical famine research by incorporating data and methods from both history and palaeoclimatology.