“Y vi un caballo negro y el que lo montaba tenía una balanza en la mano”: Hambrunas en la Nueva Granada, 1690-1820

From the last decade of the 17th century, and more frequently since the 1770s, different places in New Granada were affected by droughts and plagues that caused food shortage, especially wheat, corn, plantain, and meat. In this article, the famines are reconstructed from a broad perspective of subsistence crisis because they are not limited by starvation deaths, difficult to disaggrega-te from other causes. Rather, this article analyzes a set of demographics, economic, and social control (or its lack) conditions as crisis symptoms. The specific mentions on famines or subsisten-ce crises, and the scarcity causes, were searched in various documentary sources. They include urban rules about supplies, civil and ecclesiastical inspections, Indian transfer procedure and removal of their resguardos, demands of priests for their stipends, trials, viceroys’ records, and tax exemption requests. In many cases, the food shortage concurred with epidemics, and the famine was caused by factors like demands of food and raw materials imposed by the main cities, the lack of public barns, the extinction of many resguardos, the immigration to urban centers, and the foreign trade regulation.