The Politics of Famine in European History and Memory

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 political actors and regimes, and how the politics of perpetrating hunger and the politics of relieving it have often been intertwined. They also address how famine legacies have been subsequently politicized in public debates, educational practices, and popular media; and how these socially and politically constructed memories and myths, in turn, have shaped broader narratives about hunger and humanitarianism both in history and today.

The Politics of Famine in European History and Memory provides a crucial resource for scholars and students from all disciplines interested in the study of famines, as well as those interested in the history of war and troubled pasts more generally.

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 (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.