Recession or resilience? Long-range socioeconomic consequences of the 17th century volcanic eruptions in northern Fennoscandia

Abstract

Abstract. Past volcanic eruptions and their climatic impacts have been linked increasingly with co-occurring societal crises – like crop failures and famines – in recent research. Yet, as many of the volcanic cooling studies have a supra-regional or hemispheric focus, establishing pathways from climatic effects of an eruption to human repercussions has remained very challenging due to high spatial variability of socio-environmental systems. This, in turn, may render a distinction of coincidence from causation difficult. In this study, we employ micro-regionally resolved natural and written sources to study three 17th century volcanic eruptions (i.e., 1600 Huaynaputina, 1640/1641 Koma-ga-take–Parker, and 1695 unidentified) to look into their climatic and socioeconomic impacts among rural agricultural society in Ostrobothnia (Finland) with high temporal and spatial precision. Tree-ring and grain tithe data indicate that all three eruptions would have caused significant summer season temperature cooling and poor grain harvest in the region. Yet, tax debt records reveal that the socioeconomic consequences varied considerably among the eruptions as well as in time, space, and within the society. Whether the volcanic events had a strong or weak socioeconomic effect depended on various factors, such as the prevailing agro-ecosystem, resource availability, material capital, physical and immaterial networks, and institutional practices. These factors influenced societal vulnerability and resilience to cold pulses and associated harvest failures. This paper proposes that, besides detecting coinciding human calamities, more careful investigation at the micro-regional scale has a clear added value as it can provide deeper understanding of why and among whom the distal volcanic eruptions resulted in different societal impacts. Such understanding, in turn, can contribute to interdisciplinary research, advise political decision-making, and enhance scientific outreach.

Climatic signatures in early modern European grain harvest yields

“…The maximum number of lags used, m, must be chosen. For this article, we applied the Wald test at the p = 0.05 significance level, and allowed lags up to Bekar, 2019;Huhtamaa et al, 2022;Ljungqvist et al, 2022). The Granger causality is calculated both on the 10-year high-pass filtered data and on linearly detrended data.…”

“…Considering auto-correlation (AR1), no systematic differences in the strength of climate-harvest relationships are found between data characterised by high or low AR1 values. The auto-correlative structure of harvest series could be dependent on a number of factors, e.g., informal regulations of local tithes (Leijonhufvud, 2001), inadequate documentation (Le Roy Ladurie and Goy, 1982), access to and shortage of seed grain (Huhtamaa et al, 2022) or possibly through a dependency on a climatic variable with an auto-correlative structure (Esper et al, 2015). In the first three of these hypothesised causes, it could be expected that harvest data with an AR1 higher than that of the climate parameters would have produced weaker correlations.…”

“…The lack of seed grain after consecutive harvest failures could reduce the harvest also in subsequent year(s) of good growth conditions (Appleby, 1979;Pfister, 1990;Bekar, 2019). This has, for example, also been demonstrated to have been a major problem in early modern Finland (Huhtamaa et al, 2022), but even in non-peripheral rich agricultural districts as Scania (Brasch, 2016). Grain storage and trade eventually reduced or eliminated the effect of seed shortages after harvest failures (Krämer, 2015).…”

“…Stimulated by the want to place contemporary global warming impacts on agriculture into a long-term perspective, investigations of past climateharvest yield relationships have attained an increasing interest during the past two decades (for a review, see Ljungqvist et al, 2021). However, much of this scholarship has focused on the consequences for food security, and related societal impacts, in case of consecutive years of adverse climatic conditions for grain production (Pfister and Brázdil, 1999;D'Arrigo et al, 2020;Huhtamaa et al, 2022;Stoffel et al, 2022). Years and decades with cold springs, and excessively wet summers, were associated with unfavourable conditions for crop growth north of the Mediterranean region (Camenisch, 2015;White et al, 2018;Pfister and Wanner, 2021).…”

“…Existing studies of climate effects on historical grain yields have mainly focused on very cold periods, in particular those containing known episodes of famines (e.g., Camenisch et al, 2016;D'Arrigo et al, 2020;Huhtamaa et al, 2022), or on extreme droughts (e.g., Brázdil et al, 2019) or floods (e.g., Kiss, 2019). However, a number of studies have also investigated the relationship between climate variability and grain yields over longer time periods (e.g., Landsteiner, 2005;Edvinsson et al, 2009;Campbell, 2010Campbell, , 2016Huhtamaa et al, 2015;Huhtamaa and Helama, 2017;Skoglund, 2022).…”