The ‘Great El Niño’, 1790–1794

Abstract

By the 1780s it starts to become possible to reconstruct the global impact of major El Niño events with some genuine statistical accuracy. This is largely because of the wealth of data gathered by the British East India Company. By far the greatest amount of information we have available relating to the droughts of the eighteenth century is of the ‘Great’ El Niño of 1790–1794. This was of particular significance on account of its strong global effects, the particular sequence of events which it manifested and the very prolonged nature of the droughts it produced, especially in South Asia but also Australia, America and Africa. The evidence of intense and prolonged global impacts suggests it may have been among the most severe in the written record.