CSP 25 Food Revolutions in Early Modern Europe

Food has always been fraught with politics and class and culture. This class examines revolutions in food supply and their role in defining European culture and history between the 15th-18th centuries. The Industrial Revolution was famously preceded by an Agricultural Revolution in Northern England and the Dutch Lowlands in late Medieval Europe, as well the revolutionary impacts of the Columbian Exchange on new crops to feed a rapidly expanding world population. A century of famine and war during the ‘Little Ice Age’ fed into more famous political and cultural upheavals of the eighteenth century. Approaching larger issues of economic production and technological development from the perspective of food, this class incorporates issues of climate, environment and culture in the early modern history of Europe.