1816 was a time when the overwhelming majority of the world’s population depended on subsistence agriculture, living precariously from harvest to harvest. When the crops failed that year, and again the next, starving rural legions from China to map iconIreland swarmed out of the countryside to market towns to beg for alms or sell their children in exchange for food. Famine-friendly diseases cholera and typhus stalked the globe from map iconIndia to map iconItaly, while the price of bread and rice, the world’s staple foods, skyrocketed with no relief in sight. Across a European continent devastated by the Napoleonic wars, tens of thousands of unemployed veterans found themselves unable to feed their families. They gave vent to their desperation in town square riots and military-style campaigns of arson, while governments everywhere feared revolution. In map iconNew England, 1816 was nicknamed “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death,” while Germans called 1817 “The Year of the Beggar.” In terms of its enduring presence in folklore, as well as its status in the scientific literature, 1816’s cold summer was the most significant meteorological event of the nineteenth century. The global climate emergency period of 1816-18, as a whole, offers us a clear window onto a world convulsed by weather anomalies, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in weather patterns, and to a consequent tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation and unrest.
