The Problem

Abstract

Between 1750 and 1850 the population of north-western Europe almost doubled. Rises on this scale had happened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and also in the later fifteenth and sixteenth, but these periods had been punctuated by major crises, and had ended with setbacks in the hunger and plagues of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. As late as the 1690s Scotland and the Nordic countries experienced famines which reduced the population of parts of Scotland by at least 15 per cent and of some areas of Finland by over a quarter. The first half of the eighteenth century saw continuing problems. The Great Northern War of 1699–1721 brought dislocation and starvation to much of Scandinavia; perhaps a fifth of adult male Finns died. Smallpox killed a third of the population of Iceland in 1707. Many areas of France experienced famine in 1708–10. Plague rampaged through Denmark, Sweden, Finland and parts of Germany in 1708–12. England’s population fell briefly in the 1720s and most of Europe experienced crisis in the early 1740s [2b; 3; 7; 16; 18].