The potential link between climate variability, conflict, and migration is increasingly viewed as a security issue by policy makers. Climate variability and extremes raise critical challenges to agriculture and food production all over the world, and lead to diminished coping capacity, loss of livelihoods, as well as migration flows. The essays in this dissertation raise the question of resilience to shocks in pre-industrial economies using the cases of France and Savoy during the Ancien Régime. More specifically, it documents the role of institutions and migration in reducing the vulnerability to climate shocks and hence violence. It further studies both the effect of seasonal migration as a resilience strategy against adverse economic conditions, and the socio-economic consequences of large and unexpected episode of migration.