By far the most important of the new crops imported into Europe after the colonization of America, however, was the potato. It took a long time to find acceptance among the European peasantry. In Russia in the 1830s, peasants called potatoes ‘apples of the Devil’, and government attempts to make state serfs plant them sparked a series of violent disturbances known as the ‘potato revolts’. In 1834 the English radical William Cobbett (1763–1835) dubbed the potato ‘this nasty, filthy hog feed’, while in one French district, the Sologne, it was reported ten years later that the local inhabitants
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