Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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vived on vegetables, gruel, and bread. Without surplus grain to feed animals
through the winter, and later without access to the commons to graze
cattle, eating meat became an upper-class privilege. An anonymous pamphlet
published in London in 1688 attributed massive unemployment to
Europe’s being “too full of people” and advised wholesale emigration to
America. At the start of the nineteenth century, most Europeans survived
on 2,000 calories a day or less, about the average for modern India and
below the average for Latin America and North Africa. European peasants
toiling in their fields ate less than Kalahari Desert bushmen who worked
just three days a week.
Despite increased agricultural production, food prices rose dramatically
in both England and France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Persistent famine between 1690 and 1710 stalked a population larger
than could be reliably fed. While enlightened Europe lived on the edge of
starvation, Britain largely escaped the peasant unrest that sparked the
French Revolution by importing lots of food from Ireland.
Real hunger, as much as the hunger for empire or religious freedom,
helped launch Europe toward the New World. Beginning with Spain, the
thickly settled and most continuously cultivated parts of western Europe
most aggressively colonized the New World. Before the Romans, the Phoenicians
and Greeks had settled Spain’s eastern coast, but Iberian agriculture
remained primitive until aggressive Roman cultivation. The Moors introduced
intensive irrigation to Spain a few centuries after the fall of Rome.
More than five hundred years of Moorish agriculture further degraded
Spanish soils. By the fifteenth century, the fertile soils of the New World
looked good to anyone working Spain’s eroded and exhausted soil. Within
a few generations, Spanish and Portuguese farmers replaced gold-seeking
conquistadors as the primary emigrants to Central and South America.
By contrast, it took more than a century after Columbus for northern
European farmers to begin heading west for religious and political freedom—and
tillable land. English and French peasants were still clearing
and improving land in their own countries. German peasants were busy
plowing up newly acquired church land. Germany did not even begin to
establish overseas colonies until the 1850s. The northern European rush to
America did not kick into full gear until the late nineteenth century. Relatively
few people from northwestern Europe migrated to America while
there was still fertile land at home.
As continental Europe filled in with farms, peasants moving up into the
hills set the stage for crisis once eroding slopes could no longer support a
let them eat colonies