How the Potato Changed the World's History

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by William H. Mcneill

To be sure, bread never disappeared from the diet of north European populations, but in course of the nineteenth century, potatoes displaced it as the principal food for the poorer classes everywhere from Belgium to Russia. Boiled or baked potatoes were cheaper than bread, and just as nutritious. They also required far less preparation--no grinding into flour, then kneading and raising the dough before it could be baked. And acre for acre, the calorie yield from potatoes was from twice to four times what grain could supply. Advantages were such that during the nineteenth century potatoes (as well as sugar beets) began to encroach on east European rye fields. But these crops never displaced grain agriculture from its traditional primacy simply because grain was much easier to ship and store. Landlords, wanting income in cash, therefore usually preferred grain to potatoes.

Nonetheless, the practical effect of turning potatoes into a field crop was enormous. Many times more people could count on having enough to eat, even when population growth exceeded any need for extra labor in the fields. Consequently, the industrial transformation of northern Europe could and did proceed at a very rapid rate. In particular, new industries dependent on the exploitation of fossil fuels had no trouble recruiting the necessary labor without resort to physical compulsion like that upon which the Incas and Spaniards had once relied. Merely by offering subsistence wages, or something very close to subsistence, a suitable number of migrants from the countryside showed up to man the new machines and perform all the other nasty tasks of urban society. Rapidly growing European populations also filled the ranks of imperial armies and navies, and their victories in far parts of the globe allowed additional millions of Europeans to migrate overseas and eastward into Siberia as well.

All this is so familiar that it somehow seems natural that European empires should have extended round the globe and that the Americas should have been repopulated from Europe (and from Africa, where of course, the physical compulsion of slavery prevailed instead of personal response to the dictates of market prices.) Yet on reflection Europe's world dominance between 1750 and 1950 ought to amaze us. In those centuries European initiatives and example transformed the entire world more rapidly and radically than ever before. Global population growth prevailed, the Americas were repopulated, and fossil fuels provided unprecedented quantities of energy to activate industrial machines, mechanical transport and an ever more capacious and rapid network of communications. Then, after 1947 European empires collapsed almost as suddenly as the Inca empire had crumbled after 1532, and a new era began.

I hope my remarks convince you that an essential--but by no means the only--factor explaining the surprising rise of the west, to which I once devoted a book of more than 800 pages, was the extra food that potato fields made available to the peoples of northern Europe. It is certain that without potatoes, Germany could not have become the leading industrial and military power of Europe after 1848, and no less certain that Russia could not have loomed so threateningly on Germany's eastern border after 1891. In short, the European scramble for empire overseas, immigration to the United States and elsewhere, and all the other leading characteristics of the two centuries between 1750 and 1950 were fundamentally affected by the way potatoes expanded northern Europe's food supply. This, then, was the second time Solanum tuberosum played an important role in transforming human societies all round the world.