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Weathering Fields explores the meanings that people and societies have ascribed to the relationships between climate, famine events and food supplies. Bringing historical perspectives into conversation with contemporary understandings of environment and climate change, it reveals the diversity and local specificity of climate–food interactions while tracing the connections between local experiences and broader global understandings. Case studies range from early modern Korea and seventeenth-Century North-East England, to nineteenth-Century Anatolia and 1920s East Africa. Weathering Fields demonstrates that hunger is fundamentally political, revealing how social relations and power structures have shaped historical experiences of climate, food and famine. In doing so it emphasises the importance of political and social domains for making meaningful change.
"This is a highly welcome volume analyzing the complex and contingent relations between climate, food and famine. [...] The volume is a strong historical contribution to counter tendencies of climate determinism and climate reductionism and the use of climate as a tool for depoliticization. " — Matthias Heymann, Aarhus University
Dr Eleanor Shaw is a historian of medicine and currently Early Career Research Fellow at the British Library. Before entering academia she worked in aid and development, delivering health interventions around the world. She is interested in the intersections between health, social movements and organisations.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword
David Nally
Introduction
Eleanor Shaw and Robert Naylor
Chapter 1. Living in the Shadow of Coal: Harvest Failures in North-East England, c. 1660–1700
Emma Yeo
Chapter 2. Beyond the ‘Little Ice Age’: Political Discourses of Disasters and Their Reports in Early Modern Korea
Baihui Duan
Chapter 3. The Changing Meanings of Rice as Moral Metaphor in Nineteenth-century Japan
Doreen Mueller
Chapter 4. From the Soil to the Lecture Hall: Epistemologies of Potato and Climate during the Great Irish Famine
Aoife O'Leary McNeice
Chapter 5. ‘What Care These Men if India Is Starving?’: Hill stations, Climate and Famine Critique in Colonial India
Joseph Manock
Chapter 6. Drought, Cold and Famine: Missionary and Community Accounts from Late-Ottoman Anatolia
Özge Ertem
Chapter 7. Climate, Food Security and Risk in Colonial Malaya, c. 1890–1939
Fiona Williamson
Chapter 8. Soil science, tropicality and conceptualizations of the agricultural potentialities of the Tropics, 1920–-39
Theo Tomking
Conclusion
Eleanor Shaw and Robert Naylor
Index