Rebecca Earle, "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
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What Happened in the Eighteenth Century?
In the eighteenth century, potatoes became a topic of politics and discussion across europe. There was a great flourishing of pro potato promotional work published in the eighteenth century. But what had changed in the 18th century wasn't really that nobody had been eating potatoes but that suddenly philanthropists discovered them. The nature of government changed quite dramatically in the late seventeenth and over the 1800s.
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