How did the potato change European history?

The potato gave Europe a calorie-rich crop that grew on small plots, stored well and was hard for tax collectors and armies to seize. Historians credit it with ending routine famine across a broad band of the continent and with fuelling population and urban growth. It also created a dangerous dependence, which the Irish Famine of 1845-1849 exposed. [1] [2]

Hunger was familiar in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Fernand Braudel counted 40 nationwide famines in France between 1500 and 1800, and England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. Smallholders could plant potatoes on land that would otherwise lie fallow, and because the crop was so productive, Smithsonian Magazine describes the effect as doubling Europe's food supply in calorie terms. The Belgian historian Christian Vandenbroeke concluded in the 1970s that a definitive solution to the food problem had been found. By the end of the 18th century potatoes were a staple in much of Europe, and routine famine nearly vanished across a band from Ireland to the Urals. [1]

An economic study by Nathan Nunn, published in 2011, compared regions by their suitability for potatoes before and after the crop arrived. It estimated that the potato accounted for about one-quarter of Old World population and urban growth between 1700 and 1900, by its most conservative estimates. [3]

Early Andean potatoes struggled in mainland Europe because long summer days delayed tuber formation until frost threatened. Ireland's cool, frost-free autumn suited the crop, and a century of farmer selection produced varieties that set tubers earlier. In Ireland, one acre of potatoes and a milk cow could feed a family of six to eight, which mattered to tenants squeezed by rising rents. The crop spread east, reaching the Low Countries by 1650, Germany, Prussia and Poland by 1740 and Russia by the 1840s, according to James Lang as reported by the BBC. [2]

Potatoes also suited wartime. They were hidden underground and could be dug up gradually, so tax collectors and marauding soldiers found them harder to take than grain. William McNeill wrote that every military campaign on European soil after about 1560 increased potato acreage. Frederick the Great ordered peasants in Prussia to plant them, and by the Napoleonic wars the potato had become Europe's food reserve. [2] [1]

One account stresses rulers and promoters. Frederick the Great had to order Prussian peasants to eat potatoes during the 1744 famine, and Antoine-Augustin Parmentier championed the crop in France. Resistance was real: in 18th-century England, some farmers linked the potato to Catholicism, and an election slogan in 1765 ran "No Potatoes, No Popery!" [1]

Rebecca Earle doubts that elites needed to persuade anyone. She argues that peasants had already adapted the potato to Europe, and that what changed in the 18th century was elite thinking about population, nutrition and state power. In her view the potato was already available when officials went looking for crops to feed a strong population. The results do not say which view specialists mostly favour. [2]

Because European potatoes descended from a few imported tubers and were propagated as clones, fields were genetically uniform. In Ireland the potato supplied about 80 percent of calorie intake, from only a handful of varieties. When blight struck, the crop failed, and the British government's response was inadequate, as the BBC puts it. About a million people died and a million emigrated to the US, with two million more leaving over the following decades. [2] [1]