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LRB Vol. 37 No. 5 · 5 March 2015
Sad Century
by David Parrott
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century
by Geoffrey Parker
Yale, 871 pp, £16.99, August 2014, ISBN 978 0 300 20863 4
Contemporary accounts leave little ambiguity about the character of the
17th century. Natural disasters, warfare, political unrest and rebellion
combined to bring about levels of mortality, destruction and collective
trauma unmatched until the mid-20th century. The confessional conflicts,
rebellions, plagues and famines of the 16th century were mild by
comparison. ‘’Tis tru we have had many such black days in England in
former ages,’ James Howell wrote in 1647, ‘but those parallel’d to the
present are to the shadow of a mountain compar’d to the eclipse of the
moon.’ In his Essay on the Customs and Character of Nations, Voltaire
mildly said that the mid-17th century had been an ‘unfortunate’ time for
monarchs: he drew attention to the deposition of the Ottoman Sultan
Ibrahim, the destabilising of the Holy Roman Emperor, the flight of the
young Louis XIV from Paris in the face of popular revolt, the trial of
Charles I and Philip IV of Spain’s loss of Portugal and its empire: a
flood of usurpations and revolutions, as he put it, ‘almost from one end
of the world to the other’. Voltaire’s identification of the moment
around 1650 as a high point of political unrest attracted many
subsequent historians, some of whom doubted there were underlying
connections between the events, but nonetheless noted the phenomenon of
so many ‘contemporaneous revolutions’, as R.B. Merriman called them in
his comparative study of 1938. The view that these natural and human
catastrophes reached a climax around the mid-century implied that there
was some improvement after that. It was logical therefore to speak of
the mid-century as a ‘crisis’, the word borrowed from medical
terminology. Europe did not descend into anarchy, so the crisis must
have led to recovery. But if so, what was the crisis about, and what was
its resolution?
The original case for a crisis was made in 1954 by Eric Hobsbawm, who
argued that it should be understood in the context of the transition
from feudalism to capitalism: vigorous mercantile and commercial
interests that had been gaining strength through the previous century
reacted with rebellion and revolt to the economic and political
constraints imposed by feudal elites. In 1959 Hugh Trevor-Roper replaced
Hobsbawm’s economic crisis with a political/fiscal one, a struggle
between the centralising efforts of princely courts and government, on
the one hand, and provincial and local powers on the other. In 1965
Hobsbawm and Trevor-Roper’s articles appeared side by side in an edited
collection, Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660, along with other pieces
previously published in Past and Present. The volume may inadvertently
have launched the most persistent criticism of the whole idea of a
crisis: that ‘crisis’ is for the 17th century what ‘history’ is for
other centuries. Hobsbawm’s theory lost currency with the decline and
fall of doctrinaire Marxist interpretations of early modern history.
Trevor-Roper’s political crisis suffered a slower disintegration,
through a revisionism which steadily sapped the life out of binary
models that pitted a radical centre against a backward periphery, or new
bureaucratic functionaries against reactionary nobles. In the end, both
interpretations were of course thoroughly Eurocentric. How useful was
the concept of the transition from feudalism to capitalism when
examining political upheavals in mid-17th-century China? Did it make any
sense to discuss the crisis of the Ottoman Empire in terms of a struggle
between a centralising monarchy and reactionary provincial nobility?
The desire to re-examine the connections between a series of events that
were geographically dispersed but chronologically contemporary led to
another set of essays, The General Crisis of the 17th Century, published
in 1978 and edited by Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith. Thanks
particularly to the editors’ introduction and John Eddy’s essay on the
effect of sunspots, the debate was pushed in a new direction: climate
change and its impact on the food supply and demography now became a
central theme. The absence of recorded sunspots and the presence of
substantial carbon-14 deposits pointed to a lowering of average
temperatures across the world in the mid-17th century, and the resulting
Little Ice Age was seen as the prime cause of endemic hunger,
malnutrition, subsistence crises and the resurgence of virulent
epidemics. When these natural scourges were accompanied by intense
warfare, heavy taxation and economic disruption, the pressures provoking
resistance and revolt multiplied.
The volume generated renewed discussion but there were few publications
that directly developed or refined the notion of the 17th-century
crisis. In 1991 Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early
Modern World sought to subsume the idea into a far larger pattern of
cyclical unrest and rebellion, whose most significant determinant was
population expansion and its pressures. By the later 1990s it was
becoming increasingly unfashionable: in the 1980s undergraduate exam
papers regularly included questions on the ‘General Crisis of the 17th
Century’, but over the last two decades the issue has vanished so
completely from the syllabus that today otherwise well-read students are
baffled by any reference to it.
It is an irony that would not be lost on Geoffrey Parker that the Little
Ice Age is today more likely to be appropriated by climate change
sceptics than by historians: humanity survived global cooling, they
argue, so we need not worry about global warming – just another part of
the cycle. Parker’s new book, Global Crisis, responds directly to this
type of argument, asserting that humanity survived only at a terrible
cost. His epilogue is a plea that the lessons of climate change in the
17th century should not be ignored or misinterpreted. We should be in no
doubt that decisions taken now will have an effect on the future impact
of natural catastrophes, the resilience of agriculture and the
competition for material resources.
Current controversies aside, Parker’s monumental book seeks to reinstate
the General Crisis as a defining concept in early modern history, and it
is on a scale appropriate to the ambition: eight hundred pages of text
and notes, and fifty more of bibliography. The book has been 15 years in
the making, and its primary and secondary sources stretch across every
continent and extend well beyond the 17th century. Parker explores the
crisis on the basis of a massive accretion of new evidence, analysis and
global case studies, particularly from outside Europe. The opening
sections set out an extended analysis of the factors – natural and human
– that drastically worsened survival chances in the first half of the
17th century. Global cooling of 2ºC might appear inconsequential, but
had a profound impact on growing seasons, the use of marginal land, crop
yields and agricultural diversity. Regional variations and responses
also need to be taken into account: Parker isn’t making a general
argument for agricultural downsizing. Seen from a global perspective,
cooling has other dramatic consequences. Above all, for those
territories flanking the Pacific, El Niño – the shifting of surface air
pressure at the equator that causes westerly winds to blow strongly from
Asia to America – brings reduced monsoon rains and frequent drought to
Asia and catastrophic flooding to the Americas.
Parker makes it clear that natural disaster was only half the story:
this was also ‘the century of the soldiers’, and war was, for many, the
most direct reason for their sufferings. Wars were fought across much of
the globe and expanding military ambitions and ever larger armies
coincided with a general lessening in state control over the army
organisation. Combat deaths, though numerous, were less important than
the impact of soldiers on civilian society: the movements or, worse, the
billeting of troops brought poverty, starvation, brutalisation, disease
and wanton destruction. As Parker points out, the almost universal
population increases of the 16th century had led to a volatile situation
in which any reduction or disruption of food supplies, any decline in
the availability of marginal employment, any fall in wage levels or
increase in rents, pushed large groups into destitution and starvation.
War, and the mismanaged demands of sustained military activity, brought
precisely these problems to an already vulnerable population. Climate
change would have done a great deal of damage on its own, but without
the fiscal extortion, military destruction, political ineptitude and
uncertainty that accompanied almost universal conflict, the crisis would
have had considerably less impact.
Parker doesn’t apply a rigidly determinist approach: revolution and
rebellion aren’t seen as an inevitable consequence of global cooling and
the burdens of wars or taxation. The central section of the book is made
up of a series of extended narratives set across and beyond Eurasia.
Parker looks in turn at states that succumbed catastrophically to
rebellion, civil war or invasion; at those that managed to mitigate some
effects of climate change; and at those few that seemed to escape
relatively unscathed. The length and detail of these accounts testifies
to Parker’s recognition that there are no general, let alone monocausal,
answers to explain the diversity of outcomes. A determinist insistence
that dearth and the threat of starvation will always provoke revolt is
demonstrably untrue, but it’s equally unsatisfactory to deny long-term
and structural factors and insist that the explanations for particular
revolts are contingent: the incompetent decision-making of Cardinal
Mazarin, Charles I or the Manchu regent, Dorgon. In the same way,
particular social groups may have a distinct role in mobilising popular
agitation in crisis-prone societies: an intelligentsia that far exceeds
available employment; articulate clergy equipped with justifications for
resistance; opportunist nobles excluded from mainstream politics. But
again, their role in provoking or sustaining major upheaval depends on
many other factors.
Parker begins his crisis narratives with the collapse of Ming China
under the pressures of famine, banditry, civil war and Manchu invasion.
European states follow: the territorial revolts that threatened to pull
apart the Spanish monarchy in the 1640s; the Fronde uprising in France
against a hated ministerial regime pursuing an unpopular foreign policy;
the British civil wars, followed by the regicide and the destabilising
experiment in republicanism; government breakdowns and crippling social
unrest in Muscovy, Poland and the Ottoman Empire. But Parker is no less
interested in those territories where the impact of crisis was
mitigated. Tokugawa Japan determinedly avoided becoming entangled in
foreign war while maintaining a large military elite, reducing the scope
for political or social unrest. In Safavid Iran, the Indonesian
archipelago and the states of North Italy, too, warfare and its burdens
were kept in check, and resources could be channelled towards
ameliorating the worst effects of climate change.
For all the insistence on focusing on each set of circumstances
individually, the patchwork comes together to give a shattering picture
of catastrophe on both a territorial and a human scale. The human
dimension is never lost sight of thanks to one of the greatest strengths
of the volume: its massive reliance on (mostly unfamiliar) contemporary
sources. The accounts and opinions of innumerable individuals, written
in diaries, memoirs, histories, government reports, pathetic scraps of
paper accompanying abandoned children, are forceful reminders of the
costs of famine, military occupation and disease. Parker’s use of such
sources offers something new in the literature of the crisis: the
possibility of entering into the mental world of generations oppressed
by physical suffering, by the constant presence of death and the threat
of violence, by the total uncertainty and instability of day to day
life. ‘People held their lives to be of no value,’ one Chinese writer
said. ‘They knew none of the joys of being alive.’ As Parker points out,
rates of suicide, abortion, infanticide and abandonment soared, as did
the incidence of ‘melancholia’, many cases of which we would today
diagnose as clinical depression or post-traumatic stress. Even Samuel
Pepys, whose diary during the London plague of 1665 shows him
preoccupied with the favours of a new mistress, recognised that his own
happiness was set against ‘this sad time of plague’.
What of a post-crisis resolution? Was Pepys’s happiness simply evidence
of his indefatigable solipsism, or an augury of changing times? The
global scale of Parker’s project makes both the form and the timing of a
resolution to the crisis difficult to establish. Though Parker carefully
avoids mechanistic arguments which explain revolt and unrest entirely in
terms of climate, dearth or warfare, it is certainly a challenge to his
focus on the mid-century as a turning point that the Little Ice Age
continued – and worsened – into the 18th century. Global temperatures
continued to fall: the winter of 1695 was the worst in five hundred
years; January 1709 was even colder. Moreover, whereas by the early 18th
century Tokugawa Japan was enjoying its Great Peace, and the Manchu
regime had re-established order in China and was in the process of
exporting war to Central Asia, West-Central Europe was in the midst of a
second thirty years’ war fought in response to the territorial
aggrandisement of Louis XIV, and Northern and Eastern Europe had plunged
into the Great Northern War. These were wars fought on an unprecedented
scale and at an unprecedented cost. In France more than a million people
died of starvation, cold and disease between 1691 and 1701, and a
further 600,000 in the winter of 1708-9. Yet the cold, shortages and
crushing fiscal burdens brought despair and hopeless compliance rather
than revolt and resistance.
From the perspective of a historian of France, some of Parker’s remarks
in his final section seem too optimistic. How far the threat of disorder
may have been reduced by rudimentary welfare provisions, modest
improvements in agricultural productivity or the containment of
epidemics seems questionable. More convincing is his harsh argument that
in many areas the Global Crisis eliminated surplus population and so
restored the balance between food supply and mouths to feed. It was this
which made it possible for some to survive the continuing depredations
of global cooling, especially in countries where rulers had the sense to
limit their military and political ambitions in a way that, as Parker
rightly points out, had mostly not been the case in the earlier 17th
century. In that respect, as in others, Louis XIV was a throwback,
confirming Parker’s own synthesis of causation in which the actions of
individuals are as much part of the Global Crisis as volcanic ash or
military taxation.
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