Social vulnerability, social structures and household grain shortages in sixteenth-century inland Flanders

Abstract

Abstract‘Vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ have recently become hot topics in historiography. The main focus is on systemic vulnerability: the reasons why certain societies were better able to overcome crisis. In this article I want to address another type of vulnerability – inspired by the insights of Wisner and Blaikie: social vulnerability, and the differentiated impact of crisis on different social groups. Based on a unique corpus of sources – the grain censuses drafted during the grain crisis of 1556/57 – and a reconstruction of household budgets, I will reconstruct vulnerable groups, the root causes behind their vulnerability, and their coping mechanisms. By doing this I will show how systemic resilience could go hand-in-hand with vulnerable people, thus adding more depth to a growing research strand.

Famines in medieval and early modern Europe—Connecting climate and society

“…Famine vulnerability is understood as a dynamic process on various scales induced by a range of geographic, economic, and social factors such as environmental conditions, population pressure, degree of proto‐industrialization, market dependence, and impoverishment of population (Collet, 2012; Dijkman & van Leeuwen, 2019; Krämer, 2015; Lassen, 2016). Furthermore, a society as a whole can be comparatively resilient to food shortage whereas certain groups within the same society can be vulnerable (Huhtamaa et al, 2022; van Onacker, 2019). Clearly, societal resilience to food crises increased in Europe over time albeit not in a linear fashion (Campbell, 2010).…”

“…Nevertheless, improvements at one level could increase the vulnerability (through extreme poverty) of certain groups at another level, for example during the “agricultural revolution” of the 18th century (Collet, 2019; Desai, 1991). Historical scholarship has therefore tended to analyze pre‐famine institutional stability, socio‐economic conditions, (in)action of the ruling classes, and relief measures to understand the development and severity of different famines (Tilly, 1983; van Onacker, 2019; Vanhaute, 2011; Voutilainen, 2016; Walter, 2019).…”