This phenomenon wasn’t confined to Ireland. As The Wealth of Nations went to press, across Europe, the potato was upending the continent’s deep demographic and societal decline. Over the next couple centuries, that reversal turned into a revival. As the late historian William H. McNeill argues, the surge in European population made possible by the potato “permitted a handful of European nations to assert domination over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” [...]
In short, by the 1600s, the continent was already plunged deep into demographic decline. “Europe could not, with the agriculture it possessed, feed her lower classes and also support the high-flown schemes of her upper classes,” writes eminent historian Alfred Crosby in Germs, Seeds and Animals. Precedent suggests that this should have spelled long-term doom for European civilization. [...]
It’s probably no coincidence that the man who once said “an army travels on its stomach” was Europe’s first head-of-state tater-booster. So effective was the crop that Frederick the Great of Prussia ordered his government to distribute free seed potatoes and planting instructions throughout his kingdom. That proved smart: Prussian peasants survived French, Austrian, and Russian invasions in unprecedented numbers. [...]
With Europe’s food supply suddenly more abundant, nutritious, and secure, peasants lived longer and had bigger families. The population leapt from 126 million in 1750 to 300 million by 1900 (and that’s not counting mass emigration). When the population grew bigger than the number needed to toil in the fields, this time peasants didn’t die of mass starvation. They simply moved to the cities. The potato accounts for around a quarter of the population growth and as much as a third of increased urbanization between 1700 and 1900, according to an earlier paper (pdf) by Qian and Nunn.
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