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1st Edition

The Politics of Famine in European History and Memory

Edited By Ingrid de Zwarte, Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco Copyright 2025

230 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations

by Routledge

Description

This is the first book to bring together groundbreaking scholarship focusing on the various ways in which famines result from political decision-making, and how the threat, occurrence, relief, or memory of famine is instrumentalized as a political and military tool. Contributions to this volume reveal the complexities, variations, and motivations behind the instrumentalization of famine by... Read more

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Politics of Famine Ingrid de Zwarte and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco

Part 1: State Policies and Responses

1. The Autarkic Policy: The Origin of the Spanish Famine, 1939–42, 1946
Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco

2. War, Occupation and the Politics of Causing and Fighting Hunger in World War II
Tatjana Tönsmeyer

3. Food Crises, Extreme Hunger and Famine in Russia and the USSR
Stephen Wheatcroft and Filip Slaveski

4. Centre-Periphery Relations in the Soviet Post-War Famine of 1946–47
Filip Slaveski, Iurii Shapoval and Igor Cașu

Part 2 : The International Politics of Famine and Relief

5. The Allied Blockade and British Politics of Food and Famine During World War II
Ingrid de Zwarte and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco

6. Humanitarian Action: A Moral Economic Periodization of Famine Relief
Norbert Götz, Georgina Brewis and Steffen Werther

7. Fight the Famine: American Quakers and Child Feeding in Germany After the First World War
Daniel Maul

Part 3: Politization of Famine Legacies

8. Famine, Trauma and Memory. Commemorating the Great Irish Famine in the 1990s
Cormac Ó Gráda

9. “I Haven’t Eaten So Well for So Long!”: Representations of the Allied Blockade of Germany in German Textbooks and Film, 1914–32
Mary Elisabeth Cox and Anne van Mourik

10. Heritages of Hunger in Europe: Transnational Matter for the Present Day
Marguérite Corporaal

Afterword: Famines and Power, Past and Present
Alex de Waal

Editor(s)

Biography

Ingrid de Zwarte is Assistant Professor of Economic and Environmental History at Wageningen University. Her research focuses on the central role of food and famine in modern warfare. She is the author of The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944--45 (Cambridge UP, 2020).

Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco is Full Professor in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Granada. His work focuses on the study of fascism, memory, the Spanish Civil War, and post-war Francoism. Currently, he is working on a book about the Spanish Famine.

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