The six principal findings of this paper are as follows: (1) crisis mortality accounted for less than 5 percent of … total mortality in England prior to 1800 and the elimination of crisis mortality accounted for just 15 percent of the … decline in total mortality between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (2) The use of variations in wheat prices to …

Famine mortality is preventable by government action and yet some famines kill. We develop a political theory of famine … mortality based on the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2002, 2003). We argue that it can be politically rational … hypotheses that famine mortality is possible in democracies, but likely to be lower than in autocracies. Moreover, a larger share …