Disasters and History van Bavel, Bas; Curtis, Daniel; Dijkman, Jessica ...
10/2020
eBook
Odprti dostop
This monograph provides an overview of research into disasters from a historical perspective, making two new contributions. First, it introduces the field of ‘disaster studies’ to history, showing ...how we can use history to better understand how societies deal with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. Second, we introduce historians to the topic of disasters and the field of disaster studies, and explicitly show the relevance of studying past disasters to better understand the social, economic, and political functioning of past societies.
One of the ways in which towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe responded to food crises was by establishing public grain stocks, intended for relief. This article shows how purchases and ...distribution of grain in Holland were affected by the long-term developments of commercialization and state formation. Two conclusions stand out. Firstly, both the acquisition of supplies and the distribution of relief relied heavily on the market. However, while market mechanisms were originally used to provide targeted relief through subsidies, at the end of the period under examination this was supplanted by a - largely unjustified - trust in the effects of the presence and release of stocks on food prices in general. Secondly, in keeping with a long-standing tradition of decentralized governance, urban governments and urban poor relief organizations were the main providers of the safety net that protected the food entitlements of vulnerable groups throughout the period under examination, even after the establishment of a centralized unitary state in the early nineteenth century.
In the late Middle Ages the county of Holland experienced a process of uncommonly rapid commercialisation. Comparing Holland to England and Flanders this book examines how the institutions that ...shaped commodity markets contributed to this remarkable development.
A long historiography has concluded that the Northern Netherlands was famine free by the seventeenth century. However, this view has been established on limited grain price data and an unclear ...chronology, lacking a broader comparative perspective, and relying heavily on the explanation that Amsterdam was the centre point of the international grain trade. Using newly compiled burials data for the Northern and Southern Netherlands and Northern France, and integrating these with rye prices, we confirm empirically that price spikes had reduced mortality effects in the Northern Netherlands compared to the Southern Netherlands and Northern France, though the escape was greater in the cities than the countryside. The only time in the period 1551-1699 that a strong and generalized association between price spikes and mortality occurred across wide areas of the Northern Netherlands was in the famine of 1556/7. However, the international grain trade cannot explain everything. Markets in the Northern Netherlands were no more effective at smoothing out food crises than in the Southern Netherlands or Northern France. We offer alternative explanations: the reduced role of famine-related diseases spread by warfare, and the interaction (especially in the cities) between wages and poor relief.
This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the causes of the great divergence by comparing the use of expensive labour-saving capital goods—water-mills, windmills, and cranes—in medieval ...western Europe and the Middle East. Using novel ways of measuring, we find that whereas the use of these goods increased in Europe, in the Middle East their prevalence decreased, or they were not used at all. We investigate several possible explanations and reject most of them, including religion, geography, technological knowledge, and disparities in wages and cost of capital. Our analysis shows that differences in lordship systems and the security of property rights best explain the patterns found.
The late Middle Ages witnessed the transformation of the county of Holland from a peripheral agrarian region to a highly commercialised and urbanised one. This book examines how the organisation of ...commodity markets contributed to this remarkable development. Comparing Holland to England and Flanders, the book shows that Holland’s specific history of reclamation and settlement had given rise to a favourable balance of powers between state, nobility, towns and rural communities that reduced opportunities for rent-seeking and favoured the rise of efficient markets. This allowed burghers, peasants and fishermen to take full advantage of new opportunities presented by changing economic and ecological circumstances in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
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