Many researchers believe that the
potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. Corn,
another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.
More than that, as the historian William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led
to empire, “By feeding rapidly growing populations, permitted a handful of
European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and
1950.” The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.
