What if the Never-Was-Summer of 1816 didn't happen?

Recently I learned of this event: An Indonesian volcano erupted, killing many people (I forgot the number of people, to be honest) and the ashes of it caused the Northern Hemisphere an agonizingly cold Summer a year later. One obvious result was that crops didn't grow, famine leads to starvation and starvation leads to death. So a volcanic eruption caused a chain-reaction of strife.

If this event did not happen, what would occur?

  • Would overpopulation be an issue?
  • Any technological advancements? How about hindrances?
  • Heck! Would any wars even be affected by this?
I can't really think of anything else, right now. And I'm wondering what the ATL would look like.
Any ideas?
 
1816, eh? I don't think overpopulation will be a pressing concern. The 1810s and '20s signalled the start of the First Industrial Revolution, which triggered the Second Agricultural Revolution (crop rotation, new farming gear, increased output, etc). That's all pretty close to the POD, so I don't think it'd be too bad for a small growth spike.

Besides, if you think about it, it's not really a growth spike at all. It's just that instead of a decrease in rate of population growth, it stays the same.
 
I would think it would have more effect on alternate history - uh, what do I mean?

eg - Napoleon wins on the frontiers in 1815 and the war goes on into 1816; with this Event it will be truly affected

Without this event, the alternate history would contiinue without the effects of the event

Somewhere I made sense!

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 

Hendryk

Banned
Compared to the other changes the POD would bring, this one is minor indeed, but worth mentioning nonetheless: two of the most famous character types of horror fiction would never have been invented.

In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron, fleeing marital difficulties, was holed up in a villa on Lake Geneva. With him was his personal physician, John Polidori, and nearby, in another house, his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley; Shelley’s mistress, Mary Godwin; and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who was angling for Byron’s attention (with reason: she was pregnant by him). The weather that summer was cold and rainy. The friends spent hours in Byron’s drawing room, talking. One night, they read one another ghost stories, which were very popular at the time, and Byron suggested that they all write ghost stories of their own. Shelley and Clairmont produced nothing. Byron began a story and then laid it aside. But the remaining members of the summer party went to their desks and created the two most enduring figures of the modern horror genre. Mary Godwin, eighteen years old, began her novel “Frankenstein” (1818), and John Polidori, apparently following a sketch that Byron had written for his abandoned story, wrote “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819). In Polidori’s narrative, the undead villain is a proud, handsome aristocrat, fatal to women. (Some say that Polidori based the character on Byron.) He’s interested only in virgins; he sucks their necks; they die; he lives. The modern vampire was born.

(Source: The New Yorker)

So, if the weather in the summer of 1816 is nicer, Byron's guests will go boating and frolicking in the grass instead of staying holed up indoors and coming up with stories to relieve the boredom. No Frankenstein monster, and no vampires. Whatever else this TL holds, it's probably an improvement over ours for being free of the Twilight dreck.
 
There may have been some effect on settlement in the United States:

Failing crops and rising prices in 1815 and 1816 threatened American farmers...Thousands left New England for what they hoped would be a more hospitable climate west of the Ohio River. Partly as a result of such migration, Indiana became a state in 1816 and Illinois in 1818.
(Source: Smithsonian Magazine)

However, there were also continual improvements to transportation during this time (the National Road reached Wheeling in 1816), so migration could have been partly caused by that.

Joseph Smith's family moved from Vermont to New York in 1816, I don't know if this really had anything to do with the weather, since they'd have had just as bad weather in their new location. But, if they didn't move, you have no, or at least a much different, Mormon movement.

EDIT:
There was also a sort-of-war going on in the Red River Valley in central Canada during this time, partially over food shortage issues between settlers and fur traders. Weather changes might have made this go differently.

It's very likely.
But, just to be clear, it seems to be the consensus that the Mt. Tambora eruption was only part of the causes of the climate change. There were other volcanic eruptions around the same time, as well as changes in solar activity. It's likely that you have to do more than just get rid of the one eruption.
 
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> Yes Grey-Wolf, that makes sense. Much appreciated.

> In the words of Hendryk:
So, if the weather in the summer of 1816 is nicer, Byron's guests will go boating and frolicking in the grass instead of staying holed up indoors and coming up with stories to relieve the boredom. No Frankenstein monster, and no vampires. Whatever else this TL holds, it's probably an improvement over ours for being free of the Twilight dreck.
Well played, Hendryk. Well played. :cool:

> Thank you, Swan Station, for the link. (It never hurts to learn something new.)

> Color-Copycat, please explain your reasoning, if you don't mind.
 
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