Born Then1815–1816
Life during the Eruption of Mount Tambora
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 largest eruption in recorded history destroyed the kingdoms around Tambora on Sumbawa. Most victims died later of hunger and disease as ash ruined crops. The effect here is spread over all of Indonesia, so it is weak for most of Java and severe on Sumbawa and Lombok.
Deaths: about 70,000 to 90,000 on Sumbawa and Lombok, most from the famine that followed.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
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
- Sugar slavery in the Caribbean 1640–1799
- Slavery in the British North American colonies 1660–1799
- Spanish missions in California 1769–1799
- 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
- Spanish American wars of independence 1808–1826
- Eruption of Mount Tambora 1815–1816
- British emigration to the colonies and America 1815–1913
- Year Without a Summer 1816–1817
- First cholera pandemic 1817–1824
- Java War 1825–1830
- Cultivation System in Java 1830–1870
- Abolition of slavery in the British Empire 1834–1838
- Indian indenture system 1834–1917