How the Potato Changed the World's History

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by William H. Mcneill

Quite a career for a plant we often treat with derision! And since I began my professional career by writing a doctoral thesis on The Influence of the Potato on Irish History (McNeill, 1947), and initially intended to write at length about its influence on European history, but never got round to doing so, I take particular pleasure on this occasion in summarizing the argument of the book I never wrote without doing any of the detailed research needed to support my hasty, but, I think, indisputable conclusions.

Notes

(1) In western Europe, the Gulf Stream is so warm that the ground seldom freezes in winter and potatoes survive unaffected by frost until the warmth of spring starts them growing. Further east in Europe, potatoes freeze if left in the ground, thus turning into chuno. Digging them from hard-frozen ground is difficult but not impossible; and, though freezing alters both taste and texture, nutrition remains undiminished.

(2) The article "American Foods and Europe's Population Growth, 1750-1850," by William L. Langer is still the best account of how potatoes spread across continental Europe and my dates and anecdotes about their diffusion from Italy are all derived from Langer's researches. He did not, however, recognize the connection between acceptance of potatoes and military foraging that dictated the route of the potato's geographic migration.

(3) Among the Maoris of New Zealand, potatoes played as important a role as in the Scottish Highlands. Potatoes arrived with whalers soon after Captain Cook circumnavigated the islands in 1769-70, and gave the Maoris a much more productive crop than any they had known before. They took to it at once. As a result, population grew and tribal struggles intensified, until diseases introduced from Europe and armed collision with European settlers after 1840 depopulated Maori villages and disrupted traditional society more drastically than anything that happened to the Scottish clans after 1745. But, in New Zealand, as in Scotland, subsequent reconciliation between conquerors and conquered was unusually real and rapid.

References

Langer, William L., "American Foods and Europe's Population Growth, 1750-1850," Journal of Social History 8 (Winter 1975):52.

Langer, William L., "Europe's Initial Population Explosion," American Historical Review 69(1963): 15-16.

Matossian, Mary K, Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

McNeill, William H., "The Influence of the Potato on Irish History," Diss. Cornell University, 1947.

McNeill, William H., "The Introduction of the Potato into Ireland," Journal of Modern History 21 (1948): 218-21.

Parker, Geoffrey, Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659: Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries' Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

William McNeill is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, University of Chicago. His works include Plagues and Peoples (1976) and The Global Tradition: Conquerors, Catastrophes and Community (1992).