WI: No potatoes

WI potatoes never evolved the way we know them?
Say the potato plant manages to make itself rather toxic- some native animals would stand a chance of still eating it but humans would just poison themselves and become rather ill.



Don't laugh here, I know some of you are. Though not immediately obvious to some this is is a BIG DEAL.
Obviously the inca and related civilizations will never develop...but greater still would be the impact on the rest of the world even discounting the butterflies from this.
Without the potato spreading to Europe history would go very differently.
 
Without the Andean civilisations, will Spain get the kind of boost it did OTL? Most Europeans were convinced that all that precious metal came from Mexico, but IIRC the greater percentage, certainly of the silver, came from Peru. Also, will Chile and Argentina come into being as mostly 'white', Neo-European states without a strategic interest in the Pacific?

Europe is going to see a significant change of its power balance in the 19th century. There is no Irish population boom, a smaller workforce for the northern English industrial boom, and no way Prussia an muster the armies it did OTL. France and Austria remain stronger, and it is conceivable that Italy and Spain gain more weight in European affairs - maize *does* exist.
 

Hendryk

Banned
There's a chapter in What If? 2 about the potato not being imported to Europe. The consequences are surprisingly far-reaching. IIRC potatoes greatly increased the likelihood of peasants caught in a war zone to avoid starvation.

A thread has also been done about this WI.
 
There's a chapter in What If? 2 about the potato not being imported to Europe. The consequences are surprisingly far-reaching. IIRC potatoes greatly increased the likelihood of peasants caught in a war zone to avoid starvation.

A thread has also been done about this WI.

Indeed, no potato=no industrial revolution. The Spanish getting less treasure from America is a minor point.

Never saw that thread...hmm...
 
There's a chapter in What If? 2 about the potato not being imported to Europe. The consequences are surprisingly far-reaching. IIRC potatoes greatly increased the likelihood of peasants caught in a war zone to avoid starvation.

A thread has also been done about this WI.

I read that too. Basically, Europe could not have supported the population boom it experienced, and the Industrial Revolution would have been stymied because there wouldn't have been the excess people to go into the mines and factories. And in times of war, the commoners would have continued to suffer greatly, as they did in the 30 Years War (potatoes, kept in small gardens by individual peasants, basically let them survive after foraging armies took all the grain and cattle)...
 

HueyLong

Banned
Chile is a mestizo country.

But without the potato......

Now, I think there is one issue here- isn't Spain better off with an empty South America? They can establish the settler colonies they so sorely lacked, and when the silver is found.... well, thats another matter.

I don't believe that no potato equals no Industrial Revolution. Certainly a different one, one which starts with a bigger focus on mechanization and consolidation of labor. But there was enough population growth and enough of a forward trend even without the potato to argue that it will still happen.
 
No potatoes means more Leeks and maybe more Carrots. Leeks are the main Tuber, the potatoes replaced.
Whe would have more Cauliflower, and Broccoli.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
No potatoes means more Leeks and maybe more Carrots. Leeks are the main Tuber, the potatoes replaced.
Whe would have more Cauliflower, and Broccoli.

We would still have swede which isn't all tha different in terms of growing season etc.

None of which AFAIK have anything like the productivity of the potato, which enables one to get something close to 10x the amount of food value out of a given plot. It isn't just that armies don't take it, it's also that your populations recover faster and are larger to begin with.
 
'no potatoes' would have had a grim affect on Ireland too... potatoes pretty much saved the Irish when the Brits confiscated so much of the land... an Irish family could survive on a couple of acres, with only potatoes, a dairy cow, and a few pigs...


of course, that's a boring-as-hell diet, which was probably one more reason the Irish hated the English... :)
 

MrP

Banned
'no potatoes' would have had a grim affect on Ireland too... potatoes pretty much saved the Irish when the Brits confiscated so much of the land... an Irish family could survive on a couple of acres, with only potatoes, a dairy cow, and a few pigs...


of course, that's a boring-as-hell diet, which was probably one more reason the Irish hated the English... :)

On the plus side for my Irish forebears, they'd've been spared the famine, since there'd've been no potatoes to succumb en masse.
 
On the plus side for my Irish forebears, they'd've been spared the famine, since there'd've been no potatoes to succumb en masse.

True, that's the flipside... OTOH, if the Irish hadn't been able to hang on in Ireland itself (due to potatoes), they'd have been disowned everywhere when the Brits confiscated most of the land (only to find later that wheat didn't do so well there)... the famine did force a lot of them to leave, but not all of them...
 
Top