Global Crisis

[chickenfeet]

 Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker is a very ambitious attempt to summarize and contextualize the various inter-related famines, epidemics and wars that plagued most parts of the world in the middle decades of the 17th century.  It's not easy to give a brief summary of 700 pages covering such a broad range of issues but I'ii try.

I guess the starting point has to be the state of the world as the 17th century began.  With exceptions, the 16th century had been a period of benign climate, long periods of peace and stability and hence population growth with a great deal of marginal land being brought into cultivation.  Given pre-industrial technology some kind of correction was probably inevitable but maybe not one that might have reduced world population by a third and affected all parts of the globe with the exception of New England and Japan.

So what happened?  First, there was a dramatic cycle of global cooling that devastated crop yields directly in the temperate zone and led to severe drought in the tropics.  A reduction in sunspot activity, and hence solar energy reaching earth had a direct effect but also dramatically increased the incidence of El Nino years causing widespread drought and flooding but also leading to a major shift in the weight distribution of the Pacific Ocean, which in turned seems to have led to increased volvanic activity, which reinforced the cooling effect.

Human agency seems to have directly reinforced the climactic impacts.  In Europe, the 80 Years War, The 30 Years War, The War of the Three kingdoms, the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and major revolts in Naples, Portugal and Catalonia all contributed to a cycle of rapacious soldiery being billeted on starving populations with a good chunk of religious hatred thrown in.  In China the 60 year struggle between Ming and Qing had similar effects as did religious turmoil in the Ottoman Empire and dynastic revolts in India.  In Africa the desertification of the Sahel caused population migration that drove the wars that provided the raw material for both the Mediterranean and Atlantic slave trades.  No one cause explains all these events of course but Parker posits the rise in "composite states"; where one monarch ruled multiple people of different customs, as one factor.  The monarchical impulse to impose uniformity leading to trouble and an inability to compromise.  Charles I's attempt to impose Laud's Prayer Book on Scotland would be but one example.  A general tendency for such monarchs to tax their subjects in polity A so that those in polity B could be brought to book seems to have been a general source of discontent made intolerable by prevailing economic conditions.

The evidence Parker marshal's is impressive both in relation to the human record and the natural record.  Rarely can so much tree ring data have been correlated with so many primary sources!

The bottom line is that governments coped very badly except in Tokugawa Japan, where the government seems to have learned from the catastrophes of the previous century and invested in famine amelioration rather than foreign war and New England where a sparse European population largely avoided the epidemic diseases that hit most of the Americas and was able to expand very rapidly.

The question it raises of course is that if 17th century governments dealt so badly with climate change can we expect 21st century ones to be more prescient?  The answer to that of course is obvious.  The ray of hope is that if the world can recover once from a combination of natural factors and gross governmental ineptitude perhaps it can do so again.  Even if it takes half a century of Hell to do so.

Comments

[heliopausa]

Your review sparks so many questions in my mind - to all of which the answer would probably be "Read the book!" Fascinating! There's so much which sounds intriguing and some which sounds amazing. (The weight distribution of the Pacific Ocean??) I'm eager to see the research - it sounds huge.

and following from that, I'm planning to badger the library system to find it, so I can follow the argument step-by-step - so thank you for the enticing review. :)

[chickenfeet]

There's 700 pages of really pretty intense argument. Hard to distill into a short review. The weight distribution thing really intrigued me. Apparently, in a normal years prevailing winds in the Pacific are from the Americas to Asia but in an El Nino year the opposite applies. That's enough to raise the average water level along the West coast of the Americas by, AFAIR, 17 inches. That's a big shift of weight and said to be enough to influence tectonic activity.

[heliopausa]

Thank you for that info about the Pacific - that's huge, 17 inches, and of course makes me want to know more, including about the recorded tectonic activity, and about predictability. I can't get at that right now, but I'm mulling the historical questions - about whether the seventeenth century was more disrupted than the sixteenth, or whether "composite states" really rose at that time. (The whole point of the Hundred Years War was the break-up of a pre-existing composite state, I thought!)

Sudden qualm: I don't mean to sound like I'm asking you to rewrite his arguments for my convenience! :D It's just a way of saying what a terrific and stimulating read your review was. :)

[chickenfeet]

I'm not convinced that the composite state idea a sufficient explanation for some of the things that happened but I think it was a factor. Maybe the emergence of a very high idea of kingship and the religious schism have to be factored in too but I think it is a factor. Just to take one example, if the Stuarts were only kings of Scotland they would have had neither the motive nor the means to try and impose an English order of service on the Scots. Same thing, more or less, with the Spanish Habsburgs and the Netherlands.

[heliopausa]

Counter-factual history - I wish I knew enough history to really have fun with the ideas! The possibility of a tougher Mary Stuart (and she was reasonably tough) really bringing everything to bear, to try to bring the Presbyterians to submission!
The Tudor Mary had a good try at imposing a non-Protestant order on England, despite it not being a composite state. Had she been healthier and lived longer, I think she would have succeeded, too.

[chickenfeet]

I think the difference is that 16th century England and 17th century Scotland are very different situations. The situation left by Henry VIII was, to put it mildly, unresolved. It's perfectly possible that if Mary had lived longer she might have reimposed Catholic uniformity. Equally, if Edward had lived the church might well have been fully reformed on a Calvinist model. Elizabeth could have done whatever she chose which, as it happened, was to do as little as possible. In Scotland by the 1630s the national church was fully reformed along Geneva lines and both the great magnates and the ordinary people, for the most part, were prepared to go to war to keep it that way. It's inconceivable that a king of Scotland, without the resources of England, would have been mad enough to try and reverse that.

[heliopausa]

This is fascinating stuff! I expect think you're right that a Scottish king (and king of only Scotland) would have been slower to try to force different religious order on the people - though the Stuarts were intermittently very injudicious a.k.a. "mad enough", so who knows? (Scotland-only Charles wouldn't have had Laud pushing him, though.)
I don't think the fact that the kingdom was composite was a factor in Charles II's horrible crack-down on dissent - i.e. having regained control of England, it was England he was bringing to heel.
(But I should confess, in case it's not already very apparent, that I know very little of all this stuff. Slightly more than 1066 and all that, but not by much.)