Born Then1783–1784
Life during the Laki haze and the cold winter of 1783–1784
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
The gases from Laki drifted over Europe in the summer of 1783 as a dry fog that burned crops and made people ill. The following winter was one of the coldest on record. Parish registers in England show a clear rise in deaths, especially among outdoor workers.
Deaths: perhaps 20,000 or more extra deaths in England in the summer and winter after the eruption.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from our model, estimated from the sources.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Plantation slavery in Brazil 1550–1799
- Tokugawa peace 1603–1780
- Sugar slavery in the Caribbean 1640–1799
- Slavery in the British North American colonies 1660–1799
- Burmese–Siamese War and fall of Ayutthaya 1765–1767
- Bengal famine of 1770 1769–1771
- Spanish missions in California 1769–1799
- Great Tenmei famine 1782–1788
- Laki haze and the cold winter of 1783–1784 1783–1784
- Laki eruption and the Haze Famine 1783–1785
- Smallpox epidemic around Sydney 1789–1790
- Atlantic slave trade, final decades 1800–1866
- Slavery in the United States 1800–1865
- Slavery in Brazil 1800–1888
- Serfdom in the Russian Empire 1800–1861
- Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815
- Fulani War and the Sokoto Caliphate 1804–1808