Markets and famines in pre-industrial Europe

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 143-166

  Gráda, Cormac Ó ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33751016812     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0022195054741181     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (New York, 1989), 22, 90-91, 143-144, 155;
2. Karl Gunnar Persson, Grain Markets in Europe 1500-1900, Integration and Regulation (New York, 1999), 41-42.
3. Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature, and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York, 1976; orig. pub. 1776), 526-534.
4. Hoarders might not suffer too much of a loss, since the cost of storage implies a gradual reduction in consumption over the harvest-year. Drèze and. Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 91.
5. See also Quesriay's remark about corn: "The pretext of remedying famines in a kingdom, by intercepting the trade in grain between the provinces, gives rise to further abuses which increase suffering, destroy agriculture, and decimate the revenues of the kingdom" (François Quesnay, François Quesnay et la Physiocratie, II: textes annotés [Paris, 1958], 494, n., my translation).
6. See Persson, Grain Markets;
7. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet und the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 73-80;
8. Thomas R. Malthus, An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions (London, 1800). 12-14;
9. Mountifort Longfield, Lectures on Political Economy (London, 1834), 52-58.
10. Young did not blame grain merchants. In Travels in France, he stressed, their part in minimizing the danger of famine, and denounced the anti-speculator sentiment of the French cahiers de doléance.
11. In The Question of Scarcity Plainly Stated, prompted by the near famine of 1800, he argued that the harvest shortfall was "great and real [and] a very high price a necessary consequence," against critics who blamed artificial manipulation by hoarders and speculators. But Young did not fully trust merchants' judgment about the size of the harvest, and, as secretary of the Board of Agriculture, urged the necessity of a national agricultural census.
12. See Arthur Young, Travels In France (Dublin, 1793), II, 401;
13. Arthur Young, idem, The Question of Scarcity Plainly Stated, and Remedies Considered (London, 1801);
14. Salim Rashid, "The Policy of Laissez-Faire during Scarcities,'' Economic Journal, XC (1980), 497-499 (where Stewart is also cited);
15. John G. Gazley, The Life of Arthur Young 1741-1820 (Philadelphia, 1973), 410-417.
16. Bal Mohand Bhatia, Famines in India 1860-1965. A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India, (Delhi, 1967), 323-324;
17. Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (New York, 1981), 76;
18. Martin Ravallion, Markets and Famines (New York, 1987), 19, 111-113;
19. Martin Ravallion, idem, "Famines and Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, XXXV (1997), 1219-1221.
20. See also Munir Quddus and Charles Becker, "Speculative Price Bubbles in the Rice Market and the 1974 Bangladesh Famine. "Journal of Economic Development, XXV (2000), 155-175.
21. Joachim von Braun, Tesfayc Teklu, and Patrick Webb, Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses, and Prevention (Baltimore, 1999), 70-89.
22. The point about the exaggerated impact of famine on aggregated death is forcefully made in Robert W. Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 (New York, 2004), 5-6.
23. Robert W. Fogel, Idem, "Second Thoughts on the European Escape from Hunger: Famines, Chronic Malnutrition, and Mortality Rates," in Siddiq Osmani (ed.), Nutrition and Poverty (New York, 1992), 243-286.
24. characterized famine in early modern Europe as due to anticipated, rather than true, harvest failures. The famines analyzed herein do not fit such a pattern. The ravages of phytophthera infestam over an extended period in Ireland are well known. In Finland, "the harvest of 1867 failed seriously: what was left amounted to about half the normal crop" (Yrjö Kaukiainen, "Harvest Fluctuations and Mortality in Agrarian Finland [1810-1870]," in Tommy Bengtsson, Gunnar Fridlizius, and Rolf Ohlsson (eds.), Pre-Industrial Population Change: The Mortality Decline and Short-Term Population Movements [Stockholm, 1984], 241).
25. The admittedly limited quantitative data available suggests that bad weather also severely affected the harvests in France in 1693 and 1708 (Marcel Lachiver, Les années de misère: la famine au temps du Grand Roi [Paris, 1991], 118, 308-309).
26. Robert C. Allen, "Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe," European Review of Economic History, IV (2000), 1-26.
27. For a more benign assessment of ancien régime French agriculture, see Philip T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Country-side 1450-1815 (Princeton, 1990).
28. See also David Weir, "Markets and Mortality in France, 1600-1789," in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds.), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (New York, 1989), 201-234.
29. Lachiver, Les années de misère, 361, 381-382.
30. John Lefgren, "Famine in Finland 1867-8," Intermountain Economic Review, IV (1973), 17-31;
31. Anti Häkkinen, Vappu Ikonen, Kari Pitkänen, and Hannu Soikkanen, Kun Hallen nälän tuskan toi. Miten Suomalaiset kokival 1860-luvun nälkävuodet [When the Frost Brought the Agony of Hunger: Finland and the Famine of the 1860s] (Helsinki. 1991);
32. Pitkänen, Deprivation and Disease: Mortality during the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s (Helsinki, 1993).
33. For background on Finland, see Kaukiainen, "Harvest Fluctuations," 235-254;
34. Auvo Kiiskinen, "Regional Economic Growth in Finland, 1880-1952," Scandinavian Economic History Review, IX (1961), 83-104.
35. Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative History of the Irish Economy 1800-1850 (London, 1985; orig. pub. 1983.);
36. Ó Gráda, Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton, 1:999);
37. James S. Donnelly, Jr., The Irish Potato Famine (London, 2001);
38. Austin Bourke, "The Visitation of God": The Potato and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin, 1993);
39. Sherwin Rosen, "Potato Paradoxes," Journal of Political Economy, CVII (1999), S294-S313.
40. Cantillon, writing in the 17205, was probably the first to denote the LOP as describing both an equilibrium condition and an adjustment process: "The price difference between the capital and the provinces must pay for the costs and risks of transport, or otherwise cash will be sent to pay the balance and this will go on until prices in the provinces reflect the level of these costs and risks" (Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général [Paris, 1997], 84).
41. For a good introduction to ECM, see George Alogoskoufis and Ron Smith. "On Error Correction Models: Specification, Interpretation, Estimation." in Les Oxley, Donald A.R. George, Colin J. Roberts, and Stuart Sayer (eds.), Surveys in Econometrics (New York. 1995), 139-170. Before estimating an ECM, the individual price series had to be tested for stationarity. In every case, the hypothesis that the individual series had a unit root could be firmly rejected. Estimation with differences in the logs of prices and the gaps between the logs of price pairs produced results very like those reported herein.
42. The data (for which I am grateful to Weir and Jean-Michel Chevet) refer to market or mercuriale prices. Gaps were very few and these were plugged by simple interpolation.
43. Elsewhere I examine the outcome of treating Vaasa as market leader and the reaction of prices in the remote northern province of Oulu to movements in the other seven provinces. See Ó Gráda, "Markets and Famines: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Finland," Economic Development und Cultural Change, XLIX (2001), 575-590. The outcome corroborates the results reported, in Table 3.
44. Ó Grácia. Black '47, 141-143.
45. For a simple example of LOP. see Ó Grácia. "Markets and Famines: A Simple Test with Indian Data," Economic Letters, LVII (1997), 241-244.
46. The Kenyan data derive from Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 144, 155. Drèze and Sen are highly critical of "the detrimental effects" of trade restrictions in Kenya "on the entitlements of vulnerable groups in drought-stricken areas," which they contrast with the effectiveness of the "highly competitive retail network" operating in Botswana.
47. The underlying database for France, which was kindly supplied by Weir, refers to forty towns and cities. For details, see Chevet and Ó Gráda, "Grain Prices and Mortality: A Note on La Michodièrc's Law," European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, (forthcoming).
48. Across the eight statistical provinces that constituted, the Kingdom of Prussia in 1871, the coefficient of variation of wheat prices averaged 0.074 from 1841 to 1870 and that of rye prices 0.117 (estimated from Royal Statistical Bureau, "Durchschnittspreise in den Kalenderjahren 1816 bis 1870," Zeitschrift des Königlich Preussischen Statistischen Bureaus [Berlin, 1871], XI, 235-243).
49. Ó Gráda and Chevet, "Market Segmentation and Famine in ancien régime France," Journal of Economic. History, LXII (2002), 706-733.
50. Elizabeth Hoffman and Mokyr, "Peasants, Potatoes and Poverty: Transactions Costs in Prefamine Ireland," in Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright (eds.), Technique, Spirit and Form in the Making of the Modern Economy: Essays in Honor of William N. Parker (Greenwich, Conn., 1984), 115-145.
51. Far greater segmentation between regional markets for potatoes in bad years is suggested by early nineteenth-century German data. Across Prussia's eight statistical regions, the coefficient of variation of potato prices during the famine of 1816/17 was double the average from 1818 to 1827 (estimated from data in Royal Statistical Bureau, Zeitschrift, XI, 235-243).
52. Kaukiainen, "Harvest Fluctuations."
53. An alternative scenario is also plausible (compare Mette Ejrnaes and Persson, "Market Integration and Transport Costs in France 1825-1900: A Threshold Error Correction Approach to the Law of One Price." Explorations in Economic History, XXXVII [2000], 149-173). The interprovincial differences in grain prices before 1867 seem to have been much smaller than those suggested, by transport costs, perhaps because in normal years, other goods substituted for grain shipments between the provinces and labor were less expensive to move than grain. If so, a crisis-induced rise in grain shipments between regions might well have increased the spatial variation in prices.
54. John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence. Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore, 1977).
55. Friedrich List's account is cited in William O. Henderson, The Zollverein (London, 1984; orig. pub. 1939), 22-23.
56. The data in Table 4 derive from Royal Statistical Bureau, Zeitschrift, XI, 235-243.
57. The rice prices refer to the twelve markets reported in Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, 1939-47 (Stanford, 1954).
58. The wheat prices exclude Cuttack (Orissa Province), for which there is no data in 1943/44. On high prices in Delhi and Dibrugarh, my source is Knight, Food Administration, 308.
59. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 533-534;
60. Sen, Poverty and Famines;
61. Ravallion, Markets and Famines;
62. e siècles (Paris, 1992), 225-226.
63. Donald N. McCloskey and John Nash, "Corn at Interest: The Extent and Cost of Corn Storage in Medieval England," American Economic Review, LXXIV (1984), 174-187;
64. Paul A. Samuelson, "Intertemporal Price Equilibrium: A Prologue to a Theory of Speculation,'' Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, LXXIX (1950), 181-219.
65. On the considerable noise in seasonal movements, see, for example, Persson, Grain Markets.
66. Ó Gráda, Ireland Before and After the Great Famine: Explorations in Economic History (Manchester, 1993; orig. pub. 1988), 116-121;
67. Ó Gráda, idem, Black '47 and Beyond, 147-149.
68. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 526.