Farming, Famine and Plague

Farming, Famine and Plague PDF Author: Kathleen Pribyl
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319559532
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This book is situated at the cross-roads of environmental, agricultural and economic history and climate science. It investigates the climatic background for the two most significant risk factors for life in the crisis-prone England of the Later Middle Ages: subsistence crisis and plague. Based on documentary data from eastern England, the late medieval growing season temperature is reconstructed and the late summer precipitation of that period indexed. Using these data, and drawing together various other regional (proxy) data and a wide variety of contemporary documentary sources, the impact of climatic variability and extremes on agriculture, society and health are assessed. Vulnerability and resilience changed over time: before the population loss in the Great Pestilence in the mid-fourteenth century meteorological factors contributing to subsistence crises were the main threat to the English people, after the arrival of Yersinia pestis it was the weather conditions that faciliated the formation of recurrent major plague outbreaks. Agriculture and harvest success in late medieval England were inextricably linked to both short term weather extremes and longer term climatic fluctuations. In this respect the climatic transition period in the Late Middle Ages (c. 1250-1450) is particularly important since the broadly favourable conditions for grain cultivation during the Medieval Climate Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age, when agriculture was faced with many more challenges; the fourteenth century in particular was marked by high levels of climatic variability.

Farming, Famine and Plague

Farming, Famine and Plague PDF Author: Kathleen Pribyl
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319559532
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is situated at the cross-roads of environmental, agricultural and economic history and climate science. It investigates the climatic background for the two most significant risk factors for life in the crisis-prone England of the Later Middle Ages: subsistence crisis and plague. Based on documentary data from eastern England, the late medieval growing season temperature is reconstructed and the late summer precipitation of that period indexed. Using these data, and drawing together various other regional (proxy) data and a wide variety of contemporary documentary sources, the impact of climatic variability and extremes on agriculture, society and health are assessed. Vulnerability and resilience changed over time: before the population loss in the Great Pestilence in the mid-fourteenth century meteorological factors contributing to subsistence crises were the main threat to the English people, after the arrival of Yersinia pestis it was the weather conditions that faciliated the formation of recurrent major plague outbreaks. Agriculture and harvest success in late medieval England were inextricably linked to both short term weather extremes and longer term climatic fluctuations. In this respect the climatic transition period in the Late Middle Ages (c. 1250-1450) is particularly important since the broadly favourable conditions for grain cultivation during the Medieval Climate Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age, when agriculture was faced with many more challenges; the fourteenth century in particular was marked by high levels of climatic variability.

Farming and Famine

Farming and Famine PDF Author: Donald Crummey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780299316334
Category : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Historians and scholars of Ethiopia have long struggled to understand the "Ethiopian Paradox": that is, how could Africa's most productive food production system, which sustained an extraordinary imperial culture over two millennia, also be home to periodic, gut-wrenching famine and rural poverty? Ethiopia in the late twentieth century has surpassed earlier icons of famine: China, India, Armenia, and Biafra. And yet, ironically, Ethiopia's highland culture also generated, and eventually exported, the iconic cuisine served in Ethiopian restaurants throughout the developed world, and in large cities in Africa itself. Donald Crummey argues that in the face of increasing environmental stress, Ethiopian farmers have innovated and adapted. In the process they have developed effective strategies for managing their environment--strategies too often ignored by conservation projects.

Feast Or Famine

Feast Or Famine PDF Author: Ed Edwin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description


Preventing Famine

Preventing Famine PDF Author: Donald Curtis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113498619X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Some urgent new thinking is needed if any lessons are to be learnt from the recent disasters. This book brings together the experience of a number of writers who have worked on, or studied, poverty alleviation programmes in Asia and Africa.

The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933

The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 PDF Author: R. Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230273971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
This book examines the Soviet agricultural crisis of 1931-1933 which culminated in the major famine of 1933. It is the first volume in English to make extensive use of Russian and Ukrainian central and local archives to assess the extent and causes of the famine. It reaches new conclusions on how far the famine was 'organized' or 'artificial', and compares it with other Russian and Soviet famines and with major twentieth century famines elsewhere. Against this background, it discusses the emergence of collective farming as an economic and social system.

The Coming Famine

The Coming Famine PDF Author: Julian Cribb
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520260716
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Lays out a picture of impending planetary crisis - a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century - that would dwarf any in our previous experience. This book describes a dangerous confluence of shortages - of water, land, energy, technology, and knowledge - combined with the increased demand created by population and economic growth

Feeding the Future

Feeding the Future PDF Author: Andrew Heintzman
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 9780887847448
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Outlines practical solutions to global food supply problems in the twenty-first century, suggesting relevant ways to address key issues related to food safety, conservation, global trade, and more. Original.

Famine in Peasant Societies

Famine in Peasant Societies PDF Author: Ronald E. Seavoy
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
In this controversial study, Seavoy offers a new approach to the problem of periodic peacetime famine based on the actual behavior of peasants. He maintains that it is possible to increase per capita food production without massive and inappropriate technological inputs. Seavoy shifts the focus from modern development economics to a cultural and historical analysis of subsistence agriculture in Western Europe (England and Ireland), Indonesia, and India. From his survey of peasant civilization practices in these countries, he generalizes on the social values that create what he terms the subsistence compromise. In all of the ages and culture, Seavoy finds a consistent social organization of agriculture that produces identical results: seasonal hunger in poor crop years and famine conditions in consecutive poor crop years. He argues that economic policies have failed to increase per capita food production because economists and government planners try to apply market-oriented policies to populations that are not commercially motivated. Once they understand the subsistence compromise, policy-makers can take appropriate political action.

Food and Famine in the 21st Century [2 volumes]

Food and Famine in the 21st Century [2 volumes] PDF Author: William A. Dando
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 892

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Book Description
This comprehensive two-volume encyclopedia examines specific famines throughout history and contains entries on key topics related to food production, security and policies, and famine, giving readers an in-depth look at food crises and their causes, responses to them, and outcomes. Famines have claimed more lives across human history than all the wars ever fought. This two-volume set represents the most comprehensive study of food and famine currently available, providing the broadest analysis of hunger and famine causes as well as a detailed examination of the ramifications of cultural and natural hazards upon famine. Volume one focuses upon 50 topics and issues relating to the creation of hunger and famines in the world from 4000 BCE to 2100, including an overview of how agriculture has evolved from primitive hunting and gathering that supported limited numbers of people to a worldwide system that now feeds over seven billion people. Volume two, entitled Classic Famines, begins with famines of the past, from 4000 BCE to 2100 CE, includes ten classic famine case studies, and concludes with predictions of famines we could see in the 21st century and beyond.

Modernising Hunger

Modernising Hunger PDF Author: Philip Lawrence Raikes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description