The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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Age, affecting the northern hemisphere from Greenland and Iceland across the
Europe through Russia to China, starting around 1300 and lasting into the
nineteenth century. This was the coldest extended climatic period since thefirst
great Ice Age, but hardly a homogeneous phenomenon. Particularly harsh were the
second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century when the
Baltic Sea, rivers in northern Europe and England and in 1622 even the Golden
Horn and part of the Bosporus froze over. As a rule, winters were longer and colder,
with growing seasons shortened by 15 to 20 percent. As the Little Ice Age began to
abate in the eighteenth century, tremendous variability ensued, including brief
warming spells and some of the coldest, harshest weather yet (in the 1740s). A series
of immense volcanic eruptions from the middle of the eighteenth into the nine-
teenth century also exacerbated the climate, notably the 1783–4 Laki explosion in
Iceland that cast sulfur dioxide as far as Central Asia and Alaska, lowering temper-
atures noticeably through 1786.
Across this long era, social distress and economic change are evident. Data is best
from Europe. Viticulture retreated from England, northern France, and Germany;
glaciers destroyed farmlands in the Swiss Alps and Iceland, pushing Icelanders to
coastalfishing villages where the codfisheries gradually collapsed as cooling waters
drovefish south. Crops failed; grain prices rose, famines ensued (in the 1690s parts
of France, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland lost 10 percent or more of the
population to famine); populations became more susceptible to epidemic. Popula-
tion movement was marked, as villages were abandoned and people sought better
climes or economic opportunities.
Nevertheless, the rigors of the Little Ice Age extended over so long a period of
time that one cannot attribute to it a single historical impact. Over time commu-
nities responded to changing circumstances. Impoverished Norwegianfishing
communities turned to the export of timber and shipbuilding. A brisk grain trade
in the Baltic developed, aided by improved shipping technology, as did overland
shipping of grain, beer, cattle and the like from eastern Europe to European cities.
Countries served by international commerce, such as England, Portugal, Spain, and
the Netherlands, could buffer themselves in times of distress with food imports
from their outposts in Africa, Asia, and the New World. Domestically countries
exploited all possible land: land reclamation technology improved in the Netherlands
and England, while in China cultivation reached to the frontier borderlands.
Colonial expansion by countries from Britain to Russia also brought new, productive
lands or peoples into the home market. Across western Europe by the eighteenth
century new agricultural techniques and new crops, prompted as much by increas-
ing density of population as by climatic conditions, intensified and diversified
production, and increased yields. Governments also engaged in provisioning to
ensure granaries for major cities, armies, or key populations; throughout its history
the Chinese state continually invested in grain reserves, while such efforts, evident
in Europe from the latefifteenth century, only became well developed and effective
by the eighteenth.
Russia’s experience of the Little Ice Age is less well attested (chronicles from
different regional centers are the best source), but the impact is clear. These


26 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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