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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW THE POTATO CHANGED THE COURSE OF WORLD HISTORY  
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Matthew Wills
July 12, 2024
JStor.org
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_ Historian William H. McNeill contends that the potato fundamentally
changed world history. European armies marched on what they foraged
locally even if it meant peasants starved to death as a result. _

The potato is native to the Andes, where it’s been cultivated for
at least 4,000 years., Getty

 

The potato fundamentally changed world history. So argued historian
William H. McNeill over a career spanning more than fifty years, from
his doctoral thesis on the influence of the potato on Irish history in
1947 to this 1999 article on the potato’s two periods of “critical
difference for world history.”

Firstly, “potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca
Empire, its predecessors and its Spanish successor.” Secondly, via
Spain, the New World plant spread to northern Europe, “where
potatoes, by feeding rapidly growing populations, permitted a handful
of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between
1750 and 1950.”

Solanum tuberosum, as potatoes are known to science, is native to the
Andes, where it’s been cultivated for at least 4,000 years. What
makes potatoes so great as food is that they “yield abundantly,”
thus making a lot of themselves; provide more calories per acre than
grain; and grow in diverse climates, “as long as the weather remains
cool and moist enough.”

But one big problem with potatoes is that they don’t store well.
Grain, the foodstuff that powered civilization in the “Fertile
Crescent” of the Middle East, is much better for storage. But
Andeans got around this liability—and still do—by freezing
potatoes and storing them underground. In the mountains, nighttime
temperatures provide natural refrigeration. Stored this way, the
frozen potatoes the Spanish called chuño “could be kept for several
years with no loss of nutritional value.”

Beginning around 100 CE, these frozen potatoes sustained the emergence
of civilization in the Andes.

“By collecting chuño as taxes from the peasants who worked the
raised fields,” writes McNeill, “and disbursing it from imperial
storehouses to labor gangs working at official command, it became
possible to wage war, build roads, construct the monumental stone
structures that still amaze visitors.”

European armies marched on what they foraged locally, with stored
grain being a particular target even if it meant peasants starved to
death as a result.

Then the Spanish conquerors adopted chuño to feed workers forced to
extract the New World’s riches. It fed the miners who dug the
“massive influx” of silver from Potosi, which supercharged a
century’s worth of Spain’s global dominance. But the resulting
global silver boom also warped the world economy with inflation:
rising prices “upset traditional social patterns, altered economic
relations and strained prevailing moral ideas” in Spain, Western
Europe, and as far away as China and the rest of Asia.

Ironically, most of Spain is too dry for potato cultivation, but
potatoes do grow in Spain’s north; it was probably visiting Basque
fishermen who introduced the spud to Ireland. Ireland’s political
situation as an English colony made it different from the rest of
northern Europe, where the potato caught on because it was relatively
safe from the ravages of war. European armies marched on what they
foraged locally, with stored grain being a particular target even if
it meant peasants starved to death as a result. But foraging soldiers
could rarely be bothered to dig up potatoes.

* potatoes
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* culinary history
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* food history
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