Nature as Historical Protagonist
The Tawney Memorial Lecture 2008
Bruce M. S. Campbell

What role did natural environmental processes, both physical and biological, play in shaping the course of economic development over the last millennium and longer? Historical accounts often overlook the independent influence that natural agencies could exercise upon the supply of and demand for resources, via their effects upon the reproduction, health, and life expectancy of humans and the domesticated plants and animals required for subsistence.

Bruce M. S. Campbell explores the significant environmental component to the course of pre-industrial economic development, investigating the comparisons between the chronologies of prices, wages, grain harvests and the corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climactic variations, taking into consideration dendrochronology, the Greenland ice cores and the episode of the Black Death.

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The Ripple that Drowns: Twentieth Century Famines as Economic History
The Tawney Memorial Lecture 2007
Cormac O’ Grada

The twentieth century saw the virtual elimination of famine across most of the globe, but also witnessed some of the worst famines ever recorded. The causes usually given for these twentieth-century famines differ from those given for earlier famines, which tend to be more often blamed on harvest failures per se than on human agency. In this lecture, given at the Economic History Society’s annual conference in Exeter in March 2007 Professor Cormac O’ Grada reassesses two of the last century's most notorious famines, the Chinese Great Leap Famine of 1959–61 and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–4, in the light of these rival perspectives.

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