Wolfgang Behringer - Tambora and the Year Without a Summer: How a Volcano Plunged the World Into Crisis

Wolfgang Behringer

Translated by Pamela Selwyn

polity

First published in German as Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, Munich, 2016

This English edition Polity Press, 2019

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Brsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2552-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Behringer, Wolfgang, author.
Title: Tambora and the year without a summer : how a volcano plunged the world into crisis / Wolfgang Behringer.
Other titles: Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer. English
Description: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | Originally published in German as: Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer : wie ein Vulkan die Welt in die Krise sturzte. Based on 3rd German edition (Munchen : C.H. Beck, 2016). | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038779 (print) | LCCN 2018040297 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509525522 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509525492 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Tambora, Mount (Indonesia)--Eruption, 1815. | Volcanic eruptions--Social aspects--History--19th century. | Weather--Effect of vocanic eruptions on--Case studies. | Climatic changes--History. | World politics--Environmental aspects.
Classification: LCC QE523.T285 (ebook) | LCC QE523.T285 B4413 2019 (print) | DDC 363.34/95--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038779

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For my mother, Margit Behringer (19252015), who taught me the joy of exploring new things.

I would like to thank Dr Justus Nipperdey, Johanna Blume, Judit Ruff, Sebastian Wei, Pascal Steinmetz, Johanna Ungemach and Areti Karanikouli for their assistance during corrections to the German edition.

Would anyone be interested in reading a book about a volcanic eruption? In the case of Tambora, there is good reason to believe they would. This book is less about geology than about the societal reactions to an event that affected the climate worldwide the largest volcanic eruption in human history. The explosions of April 1815 were so powerful that they could be heard thousands of kilometres away. The lava and pyroclastic flow devastated the immediate surroundings, and cyclones, tsunamis, ash fall and acid rain the adjacent region. The explosion cloud reached a height of 45 km. Large parts of Asia suffered for months under a dry fog that obscured the sun. Upper winds distributed the gas and suspended particles around the world. The aerosols reduced solar radiation and led to a global cooling. The winter of 1815/16 was one of the coldest of the millennium. Glaciers expanded. Torrential rains caused flooding in China and India. In Europe and North America, 1816 became the year without a summer.

The years that followed were devoted to coping with the results of the crisis. Epidemics paralysed entire regions; mass migration shifted social problems to other corners of the globe; and mass demonstrations, uprisings and suicide attacks generated a pre-revolutionary mood. The eruption of Tambora served as a great experiment in fields where we normally cannot conduct experiments: the economy, culture and politics. The question is, how do different countries, legal systems and religions respond to a sudden worsening of living conditions imposed by external forces? To changes in nature, failed harvests, inflation, famine, epidemics and social unrest? As the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, climatic events are uniquely suited to being viewed from a global perspective.

Throughout the world, the volcanic eruption forced the affected societies to confront a current problem using their own specific mechanisms for coping with an unexpected change in the climate that whether through cold, drought or constant rain challenged their usual means of supplying the population with basic necessities. Nearly all societies in the world had to demonstrate virtually simultaneously how capable they were of managing such a subsistence crisis, which almost always coincided with a spiritual crisis. Some of them seemed to do so effortlessly.

That is the topic of the present volume, which is interested not in the volcanic eruption as such, but in its cultural consequences as well as the capacities of societies at the time to respond to sudden climate change. The time period of this study is 1815 to 1820, dates that are familiar from political history as well. In 1815, participants in the Congress of Vienna resolved to reorganise the world, and in 1820, the Final Act of the Viennese Ministerial Conference integrated the intervening experiences of crisis into a set of regulations. The future US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) wrote his doctoral thesis about this period, in which an excess of wars and crises led, through diplomatic negotiations, to a political order that assured peace and stability for a generation. The struggle for political stability took place in domestic politics as well, without some knowledge of which one cannot truly understand the foreign policy of the time. The domestic policy of these years was coloured by the climate crisis.

The period from 1815 to 1820 will be treated here as a coherent period of crisis I call it the Tambora Crisis, to define it by its triggering factor. When the literature refers repeatedly to a crisis in the wake of the European wars, does not apply here. Emile Durkheims social facts are abrogated when the conditions are set not by Napoleon or the bourgeoisie but by a volcano.

From the standpoint of global history, it is easy to see that the traditional explanations do not work everywhere anyway. Why should there be famines in China and South Africa or a cholera outbreak in India because Napoleon lost a war, the British Army demobilised its troops or more machines were used in European industry? Even in Europe, one would be hard-pressed to find documents showing that anyone connected the constant rain, floods and failed harvests or the unrest that followed with the wars and their end, or with nascent industrialisation. Historians who nonetheless make this claim have used the simple facts of chronology to draw a causal connection, along the lines of the post hoc fallacy, which psychologists call a logical fallacy.