Food Insecurity and Political Instability in the Southern Red Sea Region During the ‘Little Ice Age,’ 1650–1840

Abstract

The Southern Red Sea Region (SRSR) is an environmentally unified geographic area whose natural features historically supported a closely-linked, multifaceted socio-economic. The SRSR is currently divided between Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia (Somaliland), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan. In the seventeenth century, the SRSR entered a two-hundred-years-long mega-drought that precipitated a protracted food crisis. Since states traditionally played key roles in the redistribution of food resources in the SRSR, this food crisis resulted in a region-wide political crisis at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Centralized states in Sudan and Ethiopia collapsed. The Yemeni Imamate lost control of the rural countryside. In Arabia, the drought facilitated the first Saudi-Wahhabi military conquest of Ottoman territory, which resulted in the first period of Saudi-Wahhabi control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This far reaching political crisis fundamentally changed the SRSR socio-economic system.