With a POD in 1783 (the year of the laki eruptions where 25% of the population would die to famine) , how can we have the population of Iceland, by 2020, be bigger than OTL (336k) and what PODs are necessary to achieve this?
AHC: Larger icelandic population?
- Thread starter Angel Grace
- Start date
Honestly beside keeping Iceland poorer in the 20th century, Iceland did everything right to increase its population.
I would instead go two century further back and let the Basque fishermen/whalers introduce potatoes (realistic) and quinoa/amaranth (far less realistic).
Wow. I knew potatoes were a versatile crop, but I didn't know they could grow in conditions that harsh. If they can grow in Greenland, they can grow pretty much anywhere.
Western Greenland is heated by the sea, this give the coast a warmer climate than people imagine and in some of the valleys protected from the wind, the valley’s can get a temperate microclimate. The main problem with agriculture Greenland is that the soil is highly acidic, drain too fast, and flood easily. This make the Greenlandic soil useless for traditional Scandinavian crop, but with irrigation potatoes can grow in it. On Iceland on the other hand the main problem is erratic spring freezings, high wind and erosion. Icelandic farmers would simply need to build stone hedges around small potato fields to protect them against the wind and create warmer microclimates.
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I'm not sure any of this would increase the population by much, but it probably would reduce the impact of famine and malnutrition, letting Iceland bounce back quicker after epidemics. Likely also that plus healthier populace would make the island richer and able to support more livestock which could spur the growth of an actual city there. OTL there was nothing larger than a village until Reykjavik was founded.
The reason why Reykjavik wasn’t bigger was because the Danish crown banned anyone beside the central administration from living there permanently. The Danish crown was afraid that if they didn’t the entire Icelandic population would move there and become fishermen, and let the “farmland” go fallow and leave the island open to takeover by others.
I thought the issue was more that Iceland was so poor and the population almost entirely smallscale fishermen and farmers that there was no reason to permit the organisation of a large market town and no reason to form one since fishing/farming in the villages was sufficient enough.
Do you have a good source by any chance? I'm interested in this because my TL includes a richer medieval/early modern Iceland.
Basques are not into potatoes and tend to not want to eat anything that grows underground.
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