A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe

Peter H. Wilson, Peter H. Wilson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118908433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

A COMPANION TO EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE

"This is an impressive volume, with leading experts providing a wide-ranging coverage that should satisfy most requirements for effective and thoughtful introductory surveys… All specialists on this period will find much of value in this excellent volume."
History, The Journal of the Historical Association

This Companion contains 31 essays by leading international scholars to provide an overview of the key debates on eighteenth-century Europe. It considers not just major western European states, but also the often neglected countries of eastern and northern Europe.

Placing Europe within an international context, contributors investigate key areas of society, economics, culture, and political development. The book concludes with the French and other European revolutions that brought the century to a close, both chronologically and as regards the Ancien Régime.

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe examines both established and emerging areas of interest in the field, making it an essential guide for students and scholars.

PART I
People, Production, and Consumption

CHAPTER ONE
Eighteenth-Century History and the European Environment

DENNIS WHEELER

Historical Climatology: Review and Development

Recent concerns about future global warming have prompted scientists to look to the past, and there is a growing understanding of how climate has changed over the centuries and recognition that such changes have had consequences for the societies that experienced them. The eighteenth century is of particular interest, because it was from that time that temperature, rainfall, and other instrument-based data began to be gathered following the invention a century earlier of the barometer and the thermometer, by Torricelli and Galileo respectively. For earlier periods reliance is placed on contemporary documents such as tax returns, farm and estate records, chronicles, letters, and diaries from which the climate record can be inferred. It is now acknowledged that the careful analysis of such items can provide an unexpectedly detailed picture of the climate and weather of the time. It is this recognition that has given rise to the discipline of “historical climatology.” Some of the early research in this field was conducted by historians, exemplary amongst which is the work of members of the French Annales school such as Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1972). On the climatological side, endeavors began earlier, though with little immediate effect. The Swiss scientist Louis Dufour (1870) and his French contemporary Alfred Angot (1885) both recognized the climatological significance of documentary sources, as did Charles Brooks (1926) some years later in the UK. But it is the contributions of Professors Hubert Lamb (1982, 1988), Christian Pfister (1984), and Rudolf Brázdil (1996) that set “historical climatology” on its present path and Brázdil et al. (2005) have provided an overview of the current state of historical climatological studies in which they stress the developing interest in past responses to weather extremes and variations.

This concept of social vulnerability is an important one that has recently been accorded increased attention in the social sciences by writers such as Oliver-Smith(2004). Not all, however, agree on the role that the environment plays in social evolution, and Fogel has argued that famines are “related to an extremely inelastic demand for food inventories, rather than to natural calamities” (1992: 280). A century earlier, Durkheim (1882), in his desire to provide sociology with the methodological objectivity of the sciences, was of the firm opinion that social history was only explicable in terms of social factors.

Despite such reservations, Ingold (1992) proposed that environmental and human history are inseparable and that each is implicated in the evolutionary life of the other. Post (1990) has also offered some interesting reflections on the connections between mortality, disease, and subsistence crises in which he observed that the latter “were invariably preceded by natural calamity” (1990: 241). He recognizes the more direct connections to food supply and prices, but argues that such connections are anything but predictable, nor do they conform to any recognized pattern. For him, natural disasters exercise control over poorer elements of society through the medium of such issues as problems of sanitation, unemployment, and vagrancy, all of which would hasten the onset of epidemics and facilitate their spread. Pfister and Brázdil (2006) have, from the climatological side, offered similar views. Nevertheless, occasionally quantifiable relationships have been discovered. Parry and Carter (1985) found that the pre-industrial agricultural “frontier” of southern Scotland rose or fell by 140 m for every degree of temperature change. But it is Parry who best summarizes the problem: “The task of evaluating the impact of changes of climate on the path of economic history is an extraordinarily difficult one. It embraces two disciplines which have traditionally adopted very different paths of enquiry and which require from their disciples very different realms of expertise” (1981: 319).

Such areas of uncertainty and debate notwithstanding, there is an undeniable link between climate and the success or otherwise of agricultural systems and food supply. In the long term, climate sets limits to the nature and variety of crops that can be successfully cultivated. Across northern Europe, for example, wheat production is confined to the drier and warmer districts, its place being taken by barley where growing seasons are shorter, or by oats as the climate becomes cooler and wetter in northern and more western districts. These are, however, the broadly defined circumscriptions on agriculture set by long-term average conditions and might be described as first-order climatic controls. But climate is both variable and unpredictable, and year-by-year changes can lead to good or bad harvests with inevitable consequences for political and economic systems as food prices fluctuate to reflect provision and demand. These might be described as second-order controls, and they form the focus of this chapter. They are, as noted above, complex and have responses that are more sensitive and less predictable than those of first-order effects. Subsistence agricultural practices are, for the most part, more vulnerable than commercial systems where reserves can be stored or traded to offset periods of shortage, and while some eighteenth-century systems were benefiting from investment and from the so-called “agricultural revolution” in farming practices that began in England, others lagged behind. Fagan (2000) is highly critical of the conservatism and inefficiency of French agriculture in the eighteenth century, which left it anachronisitically sensitive to inclement weather. Elsewhere in Europe, Pfister and Brázdil observed in connection with case studies from central Europe that “A group’s ability to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from crises and disaster depends on a variety of social, economic, political and environmental processes” (2006: 115). More generally it is important to note that average crop yields – a product of first–order influences – are less important in the current context than the risk and frequency of failure in meeting the minimum demands, which depend upon the second-order controls.

The Climate of Eighteenth-Century Europe

There is general agreement concerning the climate of Europe during the eighteenth century. Not only were the thermometer and barometer much-improved instruments at this time, providing more reliable measures than those of their predecessors, but the age of Enlightenment had created an intellectual atmosphere in which data and observations were gathered, recorded and compared often within the context of organized networks, or through the agency of learned societies. Such endeavors began as early as the seventeenth century when the grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, established the Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiments) in his native Florence. In 1654 Ferdinand and Leopold de Medici established the first international network of observatories, the so-called Rete Medicea, that included not only Florence but also Bologna, Parma, Rome, Milan, Paris, and Warsaw (Camuffo, 2002). It ceased operating in 1667, but just 10 years later the Royal Society’s first curator, Robert Hooke, devised a scheme for making standardized weather observations. Early in the eighteenth century Johann Kanold set up a network of corresponding observers (Brázdil et al, 2002) with quarterly reports being published from 1718 to 1726. In 1770 Karl Theodor, then Prince-Elector of the Palatinate, established an observational network through the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, the correspondents of which could be found as far afield as Stockholm and Rome, while in 1778 the Société Royale de Médecine was founded in Paris and organized its own network of observers (Kington, 1988a). The political uncertainties of the closing years of the century were to bring these enterprises to a regrettable conclusion. None of these notable endeavors should, however, diminish the contribution of those many observers across Europe who engaged in weather studies in a spirit of individual inquiry. Most notable in Britain, if only because his observations and writings have been made so accessible by the efforts of Kington (1988b), is Thomas Barker of Lyndon Hall, Rutland, whose daily record extends, remarkably, from 1733 to 1800. These instrumental observations provide a platform on which our knowledge of the climate of the century is based, but the even greater wealth of documentary records of floods, droughts, crop return, estate papers, and other documents provide yet further evidence. Deriving absolute temperatures and rainfalls from non-instrumental sources remains an area of debate, but climatologists have enjoyed much success in producing carefully scaled indices of these two important phenomena.

Drawing on such sources, objective and statistical substance is given to the study of past climates by the central England temperature series. This dataset of monthly temperatures starts in 1659 and continues to the present day, being brought up to date each month by the UK Met Office (<www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Daily/HadCET_act.txt>). It was developed by the late Professor Gordon Manley (1974), and while it represents conditions in England, it is also broadly representative of trends across most of western and central Europe. Figure 1 is based on this series and reveals only too clearly the problem of generalized statements made on such an inherently variable phenomenon as climate. The year-to-year changes are so marked that “running means” are used to smooth out such variations and to reveal the underlying trends. Useful though such a summary is, it fails to convey any sense of the variations within the year. Temperatures are, however, one part of a wider climatological picture. Regionally based rainfall records begin only in 1766 with England and Wales series prepared by the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (<www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/>). In contrast to temperatures, rainfall can vary greatly over short distances and it would be wrong to extend the climatological picture presented by the England and Wales data beyond that region. Snowfall, because of its often more dramatic consequences and episodic character, was often recorded and allows for long series to be constructed, and that of Manley (1969) takes the British record back over 300 years.

Figure 1 The central England temperature annual series, 1659–2005. The 12-year running mean (to identify the longer-term trends) is superimposed in bold

There is, however, no suggestion that the climate of the eighteenth century was in any way unique. It wasn’t, and it should be seen within the longer-term changes taking place in the past millennium. The so-called “Little Ice Age,” which prevailed from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, is generally regarded as the coldest period of European history since the retreat of the great ice sheets some 10,000 years ago. Moreover, the closing decades of the seventeenth century had been the very coldest of the period, with well-documented reflections on the horrors that accompanied crop failure: famine, disease, and rising food prices. By comparison, the opening years of the eighteenth century, must have been seen as almost benign, as temperatures underwent a slow, if at times faltering, recovery.

The combination and timing of extremes of precipitation and of temperatures of the type experienced during the Little Ice Age were often critical. For many forms of production, cool and wet summers can be more damaging than cold winters. Dry springs can be harmful for germination of crops, while wet summers can create havoc with the harvest. Such disruptions to the agricultural system have been described by Pfister and Brázdil (2006) as “Little Ice Age-Type Impacts” (LIATIMP) They single out long wet spells as being particularly detrimental, leading to a reduced flour content in grain and also leaving crops vulnerable to molds and attacks by the grain weevil (Sitophilus granaries). Such prolonged spells of wet weather can also be harmful outside the growing season, and when they occur in aut...