The Social and Economic Structure of Contemporary Europe613twentieth century. Total European production (exclud-
ing Russia) of all grains—wheat, rye, barley, oats, and
corn—stood at slightly less than 100 million tons in
- Good harvests preceded World War I, and pro-
duction had grown by nearly 25 percent in 1913, be-
fore plummeting during the war. The European grain
harvest reached prewar levels by 1929–30 but had only
slightly exceeded them when World War II devastated
agriculture and reduced production far below 1900 lev-
els. In 1945, war-torn Europe produced less than 70
million tons. Between World War II and 1980, however,
European agriculture experienced a miracle comparable
to that of European industry. Total grain production
nearly quadrupled, surpassing 250 million tons in the
late 1970s. The average diet of twentieth-century Euro-
peans is thus much healthier, and food costs were a
much smaller percentage of the average person’s in-
come at the end of the twentieth-century than they
were at the start. The agricultural miracle and its contri-
bution to the vital revolution are the result of a tremen-
dous investment in agronomy. The mechanization of
agriculture—the widespread use of machinery such as
tractors, harvesters, and threshers—has transformed
farming and required fewer people to produce more
food. On the eve of World War II, fewer than 300,000
tractors were being used in all of European farming; in
1980, the total was more than 8 million. Although
many environmental problems have been attributed to
them, the use of chemicals—both for fertilizing the soil
and as pesticides—have performed an even larger part
in increasing the yield per acre. The success of biolo-
gists in developing new strains of crops or new breeds
of animals has also greatly improved food production.
A United Nations study of agriculture in Czechoslova-
kia between 1948 and 1978 shows how much these
things have transformed agriculture. In the traditional
Czech agriculture that persisted in 1948, the UN calcu-
lated that the chief production factors were natural soil
fertility, climatic conditions, and ground preparation;
these variables explained 80 percent of the harvest size.
In the modernized Czech agriculture of 1978, the UN
concluded that the most important variables were fertil-
ization, seed quality, and the use of pesticides—which
accounted for 65 percent of harvest size.
While the success of European agriculture is impor-
tant, the foremost factor in understanding the vital rev-
olution of the twentieth century has been the conquest
of disease. In 1901 the largest cause of death was respi-
ratory diseases, including influenza and pneumonia,
which appeared on 16.8 percent of all death certifi-
cates. Tuberculosis (7.5 percent) or cholera (7.3 per-
cent) killed almost as many people as heart disease (9.9
percent). Childhood diseases such as whooping cough,
measles, scarlet fever, and smallpox were still more sig-
nificant causes of death (5.9 percent) than cancer (5.0
percent). By 1990 British deaths from infectious disease
had fallen from 49.9 percent to 0.4 percent. Smallpox
had ceased to exist as an epidemic disease, and zero
deaths were reported attributable to cholera, typhoid,
diphtheria, or scarlet fever. Whooping cough and
measles killed a total of eight children, compared with
more than twenty thousand in 1901.
The conquest of epidemic disease had begun at the
end of the eighteenth century with Jenner’s smallpox
vaccination. It made significant progress during the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century when Pasteur estab-
lished the germ theory of disease transmission and
biochemists such as Pasteur and Robert Koch began the
slow process of finding vaccines that could protect peo-
ple from other infectious diseases. Nonetheless, the
twentieth century dawned on a world still in the grip of
epidemic disease. The nineteenth century ended with
yellow fever and malaria still preventing the construc-
tion of the Panama Canal, and the bubonic plague re-
mained a rare but virulent killer that ravaged both
Honolulu and San Francisco. The twentieth century be-
gan with a typhoid epidemic in New York (1903), a po-
lio epidemic in Sweden (1905), 1.3 million deaths from
bubonic plague in British India (1907), virtually annual
cholera epidemics in Russia (until 1926), and a British
report that the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa
(1899–1902) had a British death rate from disease five
times higher than the death rate from enemy fire. The
association of war and disease would persist in World
War I. Tetanus spread through the trenches of the west-
ern front in 1915, a typhus epidemic took 150,000 lives
in Serbia in 1915 and another killed 3 million people in
Russia beginning in 1917. The Spanish influenza pan-
demic of 1919 became the most horrifying disease
since the Black Death. Though it originated elsewhere,
the disease took its name from the fact that nearly 80
percent of the Spanish population became infected. In
two years, according to conservative estimates, it killed
twenty-two million people worldwide, more than twice
the number of combat deaths that occurred in World
War I. In short, infectious disease was still a cata-
strophic feature of life in the early twentieth century.
Some diseases, such as malaria in Italy and cholera in
Russia, remained endemic. Some, such as polio, came in
frightening epidemics (such as the one that crippled