Market Failure During the Great Famine in England and Wales (1315-1317)

Famine as a historical phenomenon has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, especially since the publication of Amartya Sen's now-classic Poverty and Famines in 1981. Roughly speaking, we can identify two main scholarly camps or schools of thought: 'constitutionalist' and 'environmentalist'. The 'institutionalists' contend that famines tend to be, to a large degree, man-made phenomena, and that nature is of sceondary importace. Thus Sen argues, using the example of the Bengal famine of 1942-3, that in many cases famines occur not because of an absolute lack of food resources but because of a decline in 'entitlements' to (depleted) food resources.