Food & agriculture

Topics represented

Agricultura (24) · Food & agriculture (24) · Technology (24) · Roman Empire (11) · British Empire (8) · Companies, trade & extraction (5) · Famine, health & environment (4) · Science (3) · Slavery & coerced labor (3) · Genética (3) · War & conquest (3) · Migration & diaspora (3)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. c. 8000 BCE

   Crop selection and breeding

   Farming communities began selecting and crossing plants for desirable traits. Heritable food modification predates modern genetics by millennia.

2. c. 6000 BCE

   Organized irrigation

   Managing water for crops helped stabilize and expand production in dry landscapes. It linked hydraulic techniques, collective labor, and permanent settlements.

3. c. 3500 BCE

   Plow for tillage

   The plow concentrated human and animal power to turn soil more deeply and repeatably. It was an agricultural productivity infrastructure for millennia.

4. 367 BCE

   Licinian-Sextian laws

   The Licinian-Sextian laws of 367 BCE are associated with opening one consulship to plebeians and with provisions on debt and land. Their effects developed within a socially unequal republic.

5. 241 BCE

   Sicily, Rome’s first province

   After the First Punic War, Sicily became Rome’s first province. The province introduced forms of administration and fiscal extraction distinct from the Italian alliance.

6. 218 BCE–201 BCE

   Second Punic War

   The Second Punic War again pitted Rome against Carthage from 218 to 201 BCE. The invasion of Italy, recruitment, and supply demands affected civilian and allied populations.

7. c. 200 BCE–c. 100 BCE

   Latifundia, slavery, and rural change

   Between the second and first centuries BCE, slavery and large agricultural estates intensified in parts of Italy. The extent and causes of rural depopulation remain debated, so this entry records an uneven process.

8. 135 BCE–132 BCE

   First Sicilian Slave War

   The First Sicilian Slave War unfolded between 135 and 132 BCE. The conflict shows the structural violence of slavery and tensions in the provincial economy without reducing enslaved people to a single experience.

9. 133 BCE–121 BCE

   Gracchan reforms and political conflict

   The tribuneships of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus advanced measures concerning land, grain supply, and political participation. Senatorial opposition and violence exposed limits of Republican institutions; this was not one coherent social program.

10. 104 BCE–100 BCE

    Second Sicilian Slave War

    The Second Sicilian Slave War lasted from 104 to 100 BCE. Its recurrence on the island shows that coerced labor and provincial administration continued to generate conflict.

11. 73 BCE–71 BCE

    Spartacus revolt

    The Third Servile War brought enslaved people and other followers together against Rome in Italy. Its defeat does not erase the diversity of participants or slavery’s centrality to the Roman economy.

12. c. 20 BCE–c. 14

    Annona, roads, and Rome’s supply

    Under Augustus, grain-supply functions were reorganized and routes connecting Rome with Italy and the provinces were maintained or promoted. The annona depended on harvests, shipping, and coerced labor, not only on administrative decision.

13. 41–54

    Rome’s port and aqueducts under Claudius

    Claudius promoted public works, including development of the port at Ostia and completion of the Aqua Claudia. These projects connected shipping, water, and the annona, but their maintenance and benefits were uneven.

14. 634–646

    Loss of Syria and Egypt

    Arab campaigns of the 630s and 640s separated Syria and Egypt from eastern imperial rule. The loss reduced fiscal, food, and urban resources without ending Roman institutional continuity in Anatolia and Constantinople.

15. c. 1627–c. 1650

    Colonization of Barbados and the shift to slave-based sugar plantations

    English settlers occupied Barbados in 1627; over subsequent decades, sugar, consolidated estates, and the mass importation of enslaved Africans displaced much small production and European indentured labor. The “Barbados model” joined capital, monoculture, racial law, and social and environmental devastation

16. 1701

    Mechanical seed drill

    The seed drill placed seed more regularly than broadcast sowing. It represents the gradual mechanization of farm operations before the tractor.

17. 1769–1773

    Famine, smallpox, and Company revenue rule in Bengal

    Drought, harvest failure, and epidemic produced catastrophe under the Company’s new revenue regime, which maintained heavy demands and provided inadequate relief. Mortality estimates—including the traditional figure of ten million—are disputed and must not be rendered as an exact count

18. 1816

    Bussa leads a rebellion against slavery

    Thousands of enslaved people rose in Barbados under leaders including Bussa, challenging plantation rule and frustrated expectations of freedom after 1807. The militia suppressed the uprising; executions and deportations reveal the violence sustaining the sugar economy

19. 1822–1884

    Gregor Mendel

    An Augustinian friar and investigator who studied inheritance in peas. His results became influential after his lifetime; this entry avoids narrating genetics as an instantaneous and isolated discovery.

20. 1834–1920

    The empire expands Indian indentured labour

    After emancipation, governments and planters moved more than a million workers, chiefly from India, to Mauritius, the Caribbean, Fiji, Natal, and elsewhere. Contracts promised wages and return, but recruitment, penal sanctions, and restricted mobility produced coercive conditions; diasporic communities transformed entire societies

21. 1845–1852

    The Great Famine transforms Ireland and the Atlantic

    Potato blight repeatedly destroyed the crop, but unequal landholding, dependence, and state policy magnified the catastrophe. Roughly one million died and another million emigrated—estimates rather than exact counts—accelerating depopulation, diaspora, and nationalism under Union government

22. 1866

    Mendelian genetics for breeding

    Mendel’s pea experiments established principles of inheritance that later guided systematic plant and animal breeding.

23. 1876–1878

    Drought and imperial policy magnify the Great Famine

    Monsoon failure and El Niño struck southern and western India while prices, exports, taxation, and restrictive state relief magnified mortality. Estimates vary widely—millions died, but no single total is secure—and the disaster prompted famine codes and nationalist criticism

24. 1902–1992

    Barbara McClintock

    An American geneticist who, studying maize, showed that some genetic elements can change position on a chromosome. Her research is recognized without treating plant genetics as an isolated individual achievement.

25. c. 1910

    Adoption of the gasoline tractor

    Farmers began adopting gasoline tractors around 1910; lighter models expanded use in the following decade. Motorized power gradually replaced animal traction.

26. 1913

    Industrial-scale nitrogen fertilizer

    The Haber-Bosch process made it possible to fix atmospheric nitrogen for industrial fertilizers. It profoundly changed the availability of crop nutrients.

27. 1922

    Commercial hybrid corn

    The first hybrid corn was produced and sold commercially. Genetic improvement became an organized industrial agricultural technology.

28. 1930–2021

    Yuan Longping

    A Chinese agronomist known for work on high-yield hybrid rice. This entry recognizes a long-running breeding and agricultural-adoption program, not an individual and universal solution to hunger.

29. 1943–1944

    The Bengal famine exposes wartime priorities

    Millions died in Bengal in a crisis shaped by lost imports, inflation, military procurement, distribution failure, “denial” policies, delayed relief, and crop damage. Estimates commonly range from two to three million, but the total and the weight of each cause remain debated

30. 1948–1960

    Counterinsurgency and resettlement in the Malayan Emergency

    The Malayan Communist Party’s guerrillas fought colonial and later independent government. The Briggs Plan isolated insurgents through food controls, detention, and relocation of nearly half a million rural residents, chiefly Chinese, into “New Villages”; independence in 1957 preceded the emergency’s end