The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

For Croatia, 1816 and above all 1817 was the time of the ‘great famine’. Grain prices were between two and three times higher than they were five years later. War had disrupted communications, so relief was hard to organize. This global climatic calamity thus resulted in the worst harvests to be seen in Europe for more than a century; and it happened when Europe was struggling to recover its trade and industry after the disruptions of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The British blockade and the Napoleonic counter-blockade known as the Continental System had ruined commerce on the Continent and in the United Kingdom too, cutting off markets and throwing thousands out of work. By the end of 1816 there were said to be between 20,000 and 30,000 unemployed weavers in the London district of Spitalfields, and similar conditions were observed in textile towns in Saxony, Switzerland and the Low Countries.