Content area
Full Text
MY title is not as absurd at it sounds, even though historians have only recently begun to take notice of how the spread of potatoes and other American food crops to the Old World-potatoes and maize in particular, but also tomatoes, peanuts and half a dozen other foods we now take for granted-changed human lives, often in quite drastic ways. Nor is the idea that potatoes made a difference for Europe a new one. In the early ninteenth century, for example, Ludwig Feuerbach and other radicals believed that "potato blood" was weakening the German people and delaying the revolution they looked forward to, while a long list of social improvers argued the contrary, beginning as early as 1664 with an obscure pamphlet written by one John Forster, whose title speaks for itself: England's Happiness Increased: A sure and easy remedy against all succeeding dear years by a plantation of the roots called potatoes (London, 1664).
Today, potatoes are a valued and important crop in China as well as in Europe and North America, and remain the staple food of Andean farmers in the South American altiplano. But only twice can one say that potatoes made a critical difference for world history: initially in the altiplano, where potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors and its Spanish successor; and then subsequently in northern Europe, where potatoes, by feeding rapidly growing populations, permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950. Elsewhere, potatoes were only a supplement to other foods, and had comparatively minor impact on human affairs, so I will confine my remarks to the potato's special role in the altiplano and in northern Europe.
The plant botanists call Solanum tuberosum was native to the Andes and still grows wild there along with a large number of cultivated varieties-some of which we would not easily recognize as close kin to the potatoes we buy in our grocery stores. Exactly when such plants were first cultivated is uncertain: perhaps as early as 3000 B.C.E. and almost certainly before 2000 B.C.E.. Deliberate selection for desired characteristics altered wild ancestral varieties long before modern plant breeders did the same for the potatoes in use today....