In April 1815 Mount Tambora on Sumbawa produced the largest eruption in recorded history, obliterating the Tambora kingdom and killing tens of thousands directly, with far greater numbers dying of famine and disease across Sumbawa, Lombok and Bali. Sulphate aerosols injected into the stratosphere cooled the planet, producing the 'year without a summer' of 1816: failed harvests, record grain prices, food riots and typhus across Europe and eastern North America. Swiss, Rhineland and New England families emigrated in large numbers, and the crisis pushed settlement westward in North America. The failed monsoon and famine in Bengal in the same years have been linked by some historians to the emergence of the first cholera pandemic in 1817.
It is the clearest historical demonstration that a single geophysical event can drive urban food crisis, migration and public order breakdown on a global scale, decades before anyone could explain the mechanism. The 1816–17 subsistence crisis prompted municipal grain stores, poor-relief reform and emigration policy in European towns, and accelerated the founding of new towns along the North American frontier.
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