Yeah, as a rule of thumb potato and rice can feed twice as many people compared to wheat or other crops. Europe had neither so the potato was an instant hit since the alternative was to starve.
post-Colombian exchange, adoption of potato also helped Europe as a whole.
"By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950."
"Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply."
"Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a 2,000-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east."
Yes. Before that Northern Europe was stuck with Swede and Turnip as a staple. Potatoes reduced the resources needed to feed people which was a factor in the industrial revolution. Suddenly you had a cheap, storable, filling food that was ridiculously productive.
Before potatoes getting enough food from crops was very difficult. Wheat was common in Europe but the amount of work to get calories from wheat is intense. After potatoes it's much much easier to get a lot of calories from a small amount of land. Thank you South America!
Sugar cane and sweet potatoes also produce similar calories per acre, depending on the soil, climate, etc. Sugar also has the advantage of being durable to ship. It could be produced in high volumes on tropical plantations and shipped to Europe.
Before bulk ocean shipping of food, population was generally limited by calorie production in the local area.
Yep, the potato was favoured for the ability to grow enough food to feed your family on the shitty scraps of ground your absentee landlords "allowed" you to keep.
In a similar vein, the potato revolutionised Maori inter-tribal warfare when introduced to Aotearoa New Zealand (possibly more so than the musket), as you could grow far more calories from the same soil with potatoes than the traditional kumara/sweet potato - and they kept far better than kumara while on the move.
This allowed for longer campaigning against opposing tribes, which led to widespread mass migrations to escape enemy tribes - hence why the area now occupied by Auckland Tamaki Makaurau, our largest city, was mostly depopulated when Europeans started settling it.
And of course, those mass migrations led to more conflicts.
This reminds me of how in the soviet union they would come up with a plan for what agriculture they wanted to grow. If they happened to be really good at growing, say, wheat, but really bad at, say, potatoes: they would deduce they needed to put more manpower into potatoes.
Rather than what they should have done which was lean into their ability to grow wheat better and just live with potato shortages.
(I'm no historian so I might be characterizing this badly, I admit)
Another example is farmers in Belarus during WWII. Often the whole villages together with tools and machinery if it was any were burned down due to heavy fighting. People survived by living in dugouts and planting potato’s by hands.
Potato in especially suitable in such situations. It brings more calories per area than even rice while one still can harvest it using basic sticks. While it cannot be stored for years after the harvest as wheat, it still can last for couple of years.
Imagine that the pilgrims had been shown how to cultivate rice instead of corn, then the moral of this story would have been reversed, since growing rice requires a large collective effort, unlike corn and wheat and potatoes which can be grown by a single individual and scaled up based on need.
It shocked me when I learned a couple of years ago that common vegetables like potatoes actually originated in the Americas. I always thought of them as European foods because of their popularity there and stuff like the Irish potatoe famine.
I do remember learning in elementary school how the natives would plant plants in groups (tall corn shading shorter plants like squash and beans that don't need as much sunlight and to keep away weeds, etc.). But somehow I never connected that these were fundamentally American foods.
Ireland was certainly producing plenty of other crops than potatoes but when I said they were lacking biodiversity I was specifically referencing the potato monoculture. The poor were overwhelmingly reliant on the potato and it was wiped out by a blight that could have been largely avoided with a broader diversity of potatoes being grown. Similarly there are plenty of banana varieties around the world, but the only one sold in grocery stores near me is being wiped out by blight. Imagine if something similar happened to corn or wheat. An aggressive blight on a main cultivar would be pretty devastating, even if there are still lots of heirloom varieties being grown in small quantities around the world.
> or the range of plants that could support the high population densities of Eurasia
A bit entertaining, because maize (corn) and potatoes come from the Americas, and were adopted over much of Europe (and in northern China) because they were needed to support high population densities.
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