Nature's Evil

Grain’s way to the new capital was long: 2,000 kilometres. Barge haulers or horses pulled grain barges up from Kazan and the southern steppes along the Volga River. With luck, the grain reached the capital within six months; if things went wrong, it could take a year. The cargo might rot on the journey or the vessel carrying it might sink. Flour was easier to transport than grain. Milled locally, it was packed in birch bark baskets, each holding from 120 to 160 kilograms of flour. In autumn or winter the baskets of flour were delivered from the mills to the grain quays by cart or on sledges. Barge haulers pulled the barges upstream; it took sixty men to pull a barge carrying 2,000 baskets. In the shallows at Rybinsk the baskets had to be loaded into small boats. Like the baskets, these barques were sold for firewood in St Petersburg. One of the busiest trade routes in the world, the short canal was the bottleneck in the whole system. A barque stuck on a weir could hold up traffic for a week. New, bypassing waterways weren’t built until the nineteenth century. 16 In the meantime, the area of arable land doubled in the newly colonised lands of Ukraine and Southern Russia. The empire’s problem was that in the south there was no one to sell grain to, and in the north there was nowhere to buy it. Unable to reach the grain in Ukraine, the government sent the mountain to Mohammed, billeting a quarter of the Russian army there.

After 1850, St Petersburg had the second biggest population in Europe after Paris. The development of the Black Sea ports took Ukrainian grain to Europe. But only the railways created a national grain market, and a significant share of the Russian grain export went via St Petersburg. State intervention played a decisive role in this success. Although grain was grown mostly by private producers and the price of bread was mostly free-floating, only the state could develop infrastructure. When the price of commodities is defined not by their production cost but by the cost of transportation, the state has a defining role in creating the market.

War and potatoes

The revolution in European agriculture occurred only when America and the most important of her treasures, the potato, were discovered. Following the example of the Incas, the Spanish fed potatoes to the workers in the silver mines of Potosí. Their ships carried potatoes back to Europe. Accustomed to the purity of grain, European farmers were appalled by the dirty, oddly shaped potato. In France, people believed it caused leprosy, but in other places it was thought to be an aphrodisiac. In Ireland, the potato appeared just when the English were colonising the country in the sixteenth century. Walter Raleigh may have introduced it there himself. In 1594 he had been looking for gold in South America; when he failed to find it, he wrote a book about Eldorado. Queen Elizabeth gave him tobacco plantations in Virginia and estates in Ireland, which were also called plantations. In 1602 Raleigh sold his Irish plantations to Richard Boyle, the father of the famous chemist. Potatoes were already being grown there on a massive scale. The Catholics rebelled, the English suppressed the uprisings, and the Irish discovered the strategic superiority of the potato. The enemy trampled down your crops and stole the grain from your barns, but the humble potato continued to lie in the ground waiting for its rightful owner.