Imperial Agriculture at the End of the Little Ice Age

This paper explores the impact of extreme weather and climate change on imperial agriculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This date range includes the end of the era of cooler global temperatures known as the Little Ice Age and the rise of anthropogenic climate change associated with the Anthropocene. During this period, global atmospheric shifts contributed both to changing weather patterns as well as to extreme weather incidents such as droughts and floods. These environmental pressures unfolded at the height of the imperial era, when empires stretched across most of the inhabited earth. These atmospheric shifts played a significant role in the implementation and evolution of imperialism, and in the practice of imperial agriculture in particular. As my paper shows, the environmental effects of the waning of the Little Ice Age fueled food shortages and famine in colonial contexts around the world – and in some cases the metropole. They exacerbated instability and conflict, and they reinforced imperial agents’ brutal struggle for power.

This paper represents a chapter of my current book project, The Nature of Empire: The Environmental Dimensions of Imperialism, 1800 to the Present. Although the Little Ice Age has seen significant scholarly interest and the Anthropocene is quickly becoming a well-worn theme in contemporary literature, few studies have connected these climatic developments to agriculture and empire, and there has been little effort to examine this history on a broadly comparative or global scale. By providing this big-picture perspective, my paper illuminates key patterns of crisis, response, and adaptation to global climate change in agriculture. Such patterns remain relevant today in the context of continued and unmitigated global warming, providing critical food for thought for the future of agricultural production.