Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

by Geoffrey Parker

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century.

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses--the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis.

Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World History, Environment, Science, War, Politics

1707 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and an Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on the social, political and military history of early modern Europe, and in 2012 the Royal Dutch Academy recognized these achievements by awarding him its biennial Heineken Foundation Prize for History, open to scholars in any field, and any period, from any country.

Parker has written or co-written thirty-nine books, including The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), winner of the 'best book prize' from both the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology; The Grand Strategy of Philip II (Yale University Press, 1998), which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society of Military History; and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), which won the Society of Military History’s Distinguished Book Prize and also one of the three medals awarded in 2014 by the British Academy for ‘a landmark academic achievement… which has transformed understanding of a particular subject’.

Before moving to Ohio State in 1997, Parker taught at Cambridge and St Andrews universities in Britain, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and at Illinois and Yale Universities in the United States, teaching courses on the Reformation, European history and military history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed or co-directed over thirty Doctoral Dissertations to completion, as well as several undergraduate theses. In 2006 he won an OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.

He lives in Columbus, Ohio, and has four children. In 1987 he was diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis. His latest book is Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (Yale University Press, 2014).

Reviews

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

This book was something of a disappointment. It is interesting, certainly jam-packed with information. But it is bloated (700 pages of text), and it is structured around a basic premise that is not fully convincing. Parker is very smart. He knows a hell of a lot. But the book could have been half the length, and it would have been a more successful and readable work had it been.

Parker starts with the long-standing debate about whether or not the 17th century represented a century of crisis -- one that separated the Medieval and Renaissance worlds from Modernity. The debate began (more or less) with a series of two articles by Eric Hobsbawm in (the Marxisante) British journal ‘Past and Present’ during the mid-50’s (articles on JSTOR); an important paper of H.R. Trevor-Roper (“The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century”, P&P, 1959 – which is also on-line), and a number of conference collections published in the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s. This article by J.H. Elliott is useful in summing up the debate:
http://books.google.com/books?id=C6gR...

Parker believes that the 17th cen. was, indeed, a century of crisis, globally, largely brought about by the climate change connected with the so-called Little Ice Age. Part I discusses the Little Ice Age, and then describes the terrible consequences that followed in its train. At the beginning of this period, at the end of the Medieval Warming, the earth had reached a level of prosperity and overpopulation that left it rather unprepared for the sudden cooling that followed. The result of this cooling was frost and drought, floods, strong El Nino’s, weak Monsoons, etc., all of which led to widespread crop failures, which produced famine, which weakened the populations and left them more open to epidemics, and to the human jostling for limited resources known as war, rebellion, and the like. (Parker’s text contains often pages of quotations and examples that all say basically the same thing, so one can read this book quickly, in spite of its length, by skimming topic sentences.)

Parts II and III then take up a series of case studies of societies that suffered drastically during the middle of the 17th cen. These are the Ming-Qing transition in China; the ‘Great Shaking’ of the Romanov’s and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Ottoman tragedy (1618-83); the Thirty Years War in Germany; the collapse of the Spain of Philip IV; the Fronde in France; and the Civil War(s) in Great Britain (two chapters). All of these societies were shaken to their core. Then he turns to a series that, for various reasons, were better able to withstand the Little Ice Age -- not unaffected by it, but not shattered by it either. These are the Moghuls of Shah Jahan; Sicily and Naples; the ‘Dark Continents’ (Africa, Australia, the Amerias); and, strongest of all, Tokugawa Japan. Parker’s treatment here is mostly straight forward narrative history – though he tries to weave in, sometimes artificially, specific references to the (admittedly, many) climatic catastrophes that marked these periods of time. Some of these case studies are interesting, some have too much detail and (for this reader) were dull – but readers can pick and choose which they want to focus on.

Parts IV and V then discuss general topics including the roles played by Aristocrats, Clerics, different modes of collective violence, and the like.

Finally, in chapter 22 – he addresses Kenneth Pomeranz’ theory of the Great Divergence, and offers an interesting take on it. According to Parker, the 17th cen. saw the rise of a new type of science that was ultimately connected with the development of induction and the experimental method, a movement associated with the likes of Francis Bacon (Novum Organum), Galileo, Descartes’ Regulae, etc. This is correct (imo). Parker, however, thinks this New Science was driven by attempts to cope with climate change. Parker is a good historian, but weak on the history of ideas, and his argument here is poorly developed and unpersuasive. For a much more reliable account of the roots of induction – which ultimately lie, via the Arabic regressus, in the dialectic of Socrates (as Bacon himself recognized), see A.C. Crombie’s excellent book here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

An interest in induction during the 17th cen., however, did not appear only in Europe. There was the Navya Nayaya of Sanskrit, the works of Xie, Chen, and others in Ming China, practical learning in Japan (partially stimulated by Dutch scholars resident in Edo and elsewhere). Descartes’s Regulae, in fact, was translated into Persian for the Mughals in the 1650’s.

But it took off in Europe – and not in Asia. And the question is why?

According to Parker, only Europe had developed an institutional infrastructure to foster the free exchange of ideas in the form of universities, museums, learned societies, and the like. In Asia, scientists worked alone and in isolation, under private patronage – and so, when they did discover something, it was a one-off, often by accident, and was not widely disseminated. But in Europe discoveries fed on one another because of these institutional infrastructures.

This is, indeed, a plausible explanation

At any rate, an interesting book, but one that might have benefited from tighter editing, and from less of a reliance on the novelty of attempting to shuffle together (sometimes in a rather forced fashion) discussions of climatic with socio-political catastrophes. On the other hand, for those who are weak in the 17th cen., this serves as a useful and readable conduit.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

OH MY G-D I FINISHED IT.

It's absolutely fantastic but holy moly it took me longer to read this than it did War and Peace. Don't let that dissuade you, there's seriously so much good, well-researched stuff here, showing how climate change in one particular time period completely threw the world into chaos, but it would have been nice to know about how it would take me close to a month to read it before I started reading it.

And now I'm like six books behind on my goal to read 100 books this year...oops.

[Susan Paxton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immense yet deeply fascinating, Geoffrey Parker, Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at Ohio State, has produced an eminently readable, fluently written history of the "Great Crisis of the 17th Century" and its connection to climate change. The 17th century was a time of great turmoil worldwide. Most people will know of the English civil wars and the European Thirty Years War at the time, but in fact war and revolution, in various forms, went on everywhere we have decent records - not just Europe and England, but Tokugawa Japan, China, the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India...the list goes on and on. Using his deep knowledge of primary sources, Professor Parker moves from region to region and crisis to crisis, laying out the causes, events, and resolutions. What's different about this book is that he ties the events into climate change. For there's something else generally known about the 17th century - it's remembered today as the "Little Ice Age," a period of dreadful weather that seems to be tied to sunspot variations amplified by volcanic eruptions causing global cooling, severe el Nino events, flooding, bad summers, heavy rain, droughts at times, and crop failures leading to immense death tolls and misery due to many areas that had been populated to the very edge of their food supply. While there have been suggestions before that the Great Crisis had some roots in climate change, Parker is the first to do a truly detailed study that ties worldwide weather into worldwide war and suffering (it's worth noting as an aside here that I recently read a very new book on the Thirty Years War that nowhere mentioned the Little Ice Age. Amazing.). It's not all horror; Parker points out how countries learned to ameliorate some of the effects of the climate disaster in its waning years. But his warning that we're heading straight into another "Great Crisis" caused by our own self-induced climate disaster coupled with overpopulation and the vulnerability of our supply lines is a timely one. Excellent reading; the notes and bibliography will be very useful for those interested in pursuing the topics further.

[Elentarri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, having access to a wealth of information about the 17th century does not necessarily translate to skillfully writing a book about the subject. Global Crisis is a bloated text that could have used some trimming, tighter organisation, less repetitiveness, clearer writing, and the judicious use of an editor to tidy everything up. Does the reader really need pages of examples that the weather was colder than normal that year, or pages of examples of women getting raped during war or pages of examples of suicide? The information contained in the book is interesting; the maps, diagrams, other illustrations, and a timeline are particularly helpful; and the book also includes information from all over the globe (where available); but it's a slog to read through.

Parker describes the 17th century as a century of global crisis, largely as a result of the advent of the Little Ice Age. Part 1 discusses the changing climate of the Little Ice Age and the subsequent consequences, such as famine, disease and social disruption. Part II and Part III are treated as the usual (albeit long winded and overly detailed for this type of analysis) narrative regional history, with the occasional reference to whatever climatic occurrence Parker thought was relevant. In Part II, Parker examines various societies that did not cope very well with the crisis: the Ming-Qing transition in China (1618-84); the ‘great shaking’ of Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1618-86); the Ottoman tragedy (1618-83); the Thirty Years War in Germany and surrounds (1618-88); the collapse of Philip IV's Spain (1618-89); the Fronde in France (1618-88); and the British civil wars (1603-89). Part III is dedicated to examining those societies that were better able to deal with the 17th century crises: Moghuls of Shah Jahan; Naples and Sicily; America; Africa, and Australia (all lumped into one chapter); and Tokugawa Japan.

Part IV covers in the possible causes of civil unrest: the destitute and desperate (for various reasons including crop failure, high taxation, billeting, and state oppression); the naturally belligerent; the government critics (clergy, aristocrats etc); and those that will happily join any crowd. Types of media and its distribution (i.e the dissemination of rebellion) are also discussed. Part V discusses post-disaster recovery: escapism, innovations, and the pursuit of new forms of practical and scientific knowledge in the hopes of reducing the impact of future catastrophes.

Parker has his thesis which connects the turbulent events of the 17th century and the changing climate caused by the Little Ice Age. While I think the thesis has merit (anything that effects large scale food production, effects society), Parker's text doesn't make the argument very well, nor does it provide sufficient evidence for his thesis. Tossing in a sentence about the cold weather in the middle of a war doesn't constitute evidence! It's as if Parker has dumped all the information here and it's left up to the reader to joining the dots. The synthesis and analysis of the information is inadequate (despite all the pretty charts and graphs). From this text, I could just as easily conclude that uncaring politicians, religious squabbles, and/or war causes catastrophic crises, with the local weather exacerbating the crises. This is an interesting, but dull, book badly in need of an editor.

[Christina Baehr]

Recommended by Tom Holland on my favourite history podcast, The Rest is History.

[Anton Tomsinov · Rating 1 out of 5]

This 904-pages-long behemoth looked very promising from the beginning: I love works of Parker on the Military Revolution and the Spanish Army of Flanders. But while I read the book, my judgement had been going down gradually from 5 stars to 1. The main argument of connection between climate and social upheavals is not convincing at all and is refuted at many places by the author's own words. Worst of all, the exceptional character of the mid-17th century troubles is not proved at all because comparisons with 16th and 18th century are omitted. I remain with Niels Steensgaard, who wrote that the concept of a seventeenth-century ‘General Crisis’ has ‘become a synonym for what historians in other centuries call “history”'.
The second fault of the book is that all chapters with an overview of some theme lack structure and are a motley collection of interesting facts and conclusions with unknown basis and questionable methodologies. Also, the author repeats himself a lot, which gets extremely irritant by the end of the book.
The third fault is that a major part of the book consists of chapters on certain states, but that chapters are no better than Wikipedia articles and sometimes even worse. They contain the information that is well known to anyone familiar with the 17th century history. At some times these accounts are very biased and shallow (especially the chapters on Russia and England).
Therefore, I do not find a reason for anyone to waste time with this book. If your are in search for an academic research - there are deeper articles and monographs. If you want a concise history of the world in the 17th century - there are livelier and more objective accounts.

[Guillermo Maddalena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy instructivo y revelador. Te das cuenta de muchas cosas que pasaron en el pasado, los desastres que se sucedieron en el siglo XVII siguen en la actualidad.

[Daniel Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a big book, and when I say that, I mean, this is a BIG book: Over 750 pages of small text spread out over large pages with an extra 150 pages of notes and bibliography. To state the obvious, this is not a work that can be briefly picked up and then put down again. Rather it is a work to commit oneself to. It took me a month to complete it. It has a scope to justify the size. What Geoffrey Parker has attempted to summarize over half a century of scholarship on the so-called the Seventeenth Century Crisis. In historiography the crisis has its origin in the work in the 1950s by the likes of Hugh Trevor Roper and Erik Hobsbawm. They observed that in the middle of the Seventeenth Century a whole series of seemingly disconnected political crisis took place across the globe: In China the Ming Dynasty was overthrown, The Ottoman Empire collapsed into petty squabbling over who should be Sultan, the British Isles had a series of civil wars, a regicide, a republic and eventually a restoration, France, Iberia and Italy had a series of highly destructive rebellions that threatened but did not quite accomplish similar, Russia and Poland had events described respectively as ‘The Time of Troubles’ and ‘The Deluge’ which killed an approximately a third of their populations and those are hardly the only examples. Why did all these events seem to happen at once, peaking in the 1640s? Early historical researches, as was then fashionable, focused on all encompassing economic forces. Parker however has a different hypothesis. Focused little on the economy, indeed it is noticeable how little economic factors play in throughout the book’s pages, Parker sees in the crisis of the seventeenth century a crisis brought about by the climate.

This is no idle speculation, Parker amasses a large chunk of evidence that bad weather, bad harvests, and extreme climatic events were a commonplace in the seventeenth century and were connected to the political turmoil of that period. Constantly Parker draws our attention to the climatic circumstances to the events he described finding almost unlimited quotes from contemporaries describing the weather conditions as unusually bad and then drawing back to the events leaving readers in no doubt of his conclusion. Parker it should be noted is no rigid environmental or climate determinist, large sections of the book deal with the political and social causes of the crisis, focusing on them so much at times he seems to undercut his own argument on the climate. In addition to his documentary evidence, and unlike some other climate historians, Parker cites tree ring data, pollen data, and even sun spots in favour of his conclusion. His research is quantitative as well as qualitative. He is also very thorough in his explanations of Early Modern life and how it related to the climate and what it needed from it, going into specifics and beyond the generalities.

The book is divided into five parts. The first of which sets out his stall on the crisis, explaining what it was and how it had its roots in climatic changes as well as socio-political structures; there is quite a bit of data here to digest but by the end of it, it comes across as fairly convincing even though it is perhaps a bit overpacked with endless quotes on the same theme. The approach in this section is balanced between environmental and social causes for the crisis. In particular, the role of what he terms ‘the fiscal-military state’ in causing and perpetuating the chaotic violence of the period is outlined in some depth. Parker sees the violence of the period as generally state-and-soldier driven with the increase expense of war causing not just more deaths but more demands on the populace, leading to higher taxes and greater poverty at a time when climatic conditions meant people could least afford it, leading to rebellions and further violence. Alas Parker does not go into the state finance dimensions of the crisis (the role of taxation in each state is, for example, passed over) despite its clearly critical importance.

Furthermore, Parker gives little agency to cultural forces such as religion and political ideology. It is a world where the climate is all important and after that, the state. Religion and ideology are regularly mentioned in passing but are not discussed as phenomena as such, despite the obvious roles in the crisis across many countries. For instance, one could have an analysis noticing the very deep similarities between the Turkish Kadizadelis, the Russian Old Believers and the English Puritans and attempting to understand what it was about the 17th century (or perhaps the human mind?) that made them so prominent but this opportunity is missed. Intellectual history is not one of the book’s strong points. However, Parker is stronger at looking at the role of ordinary people in the crisis and Chapter 4 – on methods of coping with and surviving the crisis is a particularly effective chapter looking at the various strategies from suicide to migration to infanticide to retreating into a religious life that individuals partook in to escape or avoid the worst of the disaster. He does not merely show the rational reasons behind these choices but also their consequences on both the individual and on the respective societies as a whole.

This first section takes about one hundred pages. On the other hand the next two sections take the chunk of the book and are the real meat of the material. Fifteen chapters are dedicated to fourteen case studies of the crisis across the world. The second sections deals with those areas where Parker adjudicates the crisis was most severe: China, Russia, Poland, the Ottoman Empire, Germany, the Iberian Peninsula, France and the British Isles (two chapters dedicated to this one). While the third section concerns those parts of the world which, according to Parker, got off somewhat lightly from the worst of the seventeenth century: India, Italy, Japan, and what he terms ‘the Dark Continents’ (i.e. the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia). As that list shows it is a very geographically diverse selection albeit somewhat Europe focused. Even within these case studies he brings attention to states not usually the focus of general histories such as the Scandinavian states, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Iran and Indonesia. Perhaps the continental South East Asia is only place that the book does not really at least attempt to cover although some regions – like the Americas – the discussion is somewhat cursory for what attempts to be a world history.

With these case studies Parker pushes his arguments about the environment and social structure to one side and instead reverts to the history of events loading each chapter with a long series of descriptions of one catastrophic event happening after another. Some cultural and historic context is given for each place but only a brief overview rather here Parker is interested primarily in the details of what happened and its proximate causes. For those familiar with the events described there is not really anything new and it is obvious that Parker here, a historian of Spain and the Early Modern ‘military revolution’, is dependent solely on secondary sources. For areas I was familiar with, like England there are interesting and useful statistics and anecdotes but the overbearing narrative arch that Parker told was nothing new to me. However, I did learn a lot about events in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, India and other places of whose 17th Century history I knew little. The chapter of Japan I felt, with its focus on it being an example which escaped the worst of the crisis through state centralization and planning, was one of the stronger and more interesting of the case studies. Yet the parade of facts and events this dominates the central chapters of this book can be a bit overwhelming in the tradition of history books, a list of names and events lacking in a thick cultural or background description to fully understand what is going on. Understandable perhaps in a book so big and covering such a wide area but your mileage may vary, mine certainly did.

The fourth and fifth sections of the book, covering the last two hundred pages, are a return to the general overview and thematic discussion of the crisis. The fourth section is less focused on the affairs of government and state but takes an eagle’s eye view on the causes of rebellion and resistance during the crisis, how people fought to survive, why did people rebel, and how was information exchanged both to cope and understand the crisis and also how to spread revolution. Unlike the high politics of state discussed in sections two and three, ‘ordinary people’ are the key characters led albeit often led by charismatic individuals or religious preachers. The work of James Scott who studied passive forms of peasant resistance to authority seems to have been very influential here as is, somewhat oddly, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point with its emphasis on small number of key individuals bringing about by their social roles radical change. As this is a humanities book Jurgen Habermas gets a nod to with a good discussion of ‘the public sphere’. Interestingly Parker ends it by discussing how much the events of the 17th Century crisis depended on a small number of actors and the vagaries of chance and contingency. Here the individual is inserted back into the narrative.

The fifth and final section concerns the after crisis period and how states as well as individuals developed new ideas and new methods of attempting to avoid a repeat. Parker notes that at the end of the Seventeenth century and the beginning of the Eighteenth there was a revival in a global poor climate which coincided with wars, yet the consequences – while very poor – were not as severe as earlier in the Seventeenth century. Parker’s thesis in explaining this is that in the late Seventeenth century there was an increase in state provision of welfare which protected society from the worst of climatic disasters and stabilized the state preventing the rise of alternative sources of power. Some of his arguments here are persuasive but others are very glib, such as seeing the rise of tobacco and chocolate in same period as related to people retreating into themselves and avoiding the outside world rather than just the human love of a good time. This sort of theory gives social determinism a bad name. What is even more glib and unconvincing is his attempt in Chapter 22 to link the crisis to ‘the Great Divergence’ – the eventual gap which emerged in the 19th Century between Europe and the rest of the world - seeing out of the turmoil of the period the emergence of new intellectual ideas about the nature of life and universe embodied by the people such as Rene Descartes (Thirty Years War veteran) and Thomas Hobbes (influenced by his experiences in the English Civil Wars). However parts of this intellectual history are questionable (figures like Bacon, who are key here, precede the crisis while others such as Newton and Locke come after it) and does not really explain why this does not occur also in China. It reads all together as a classic attempt of a historian to relate all events in the perimeter of his favourite topic to his favourite topic, but here it is not necessarily so. However I will add that education is a minor theme running throughout the book and Parker is strong on the sociology of it if not the content and was full of facts I had hitherto been unaware of (Did you know that European Universities in the mid 17th Century had more students than they would have at any time until the late 20th Century? I didn’t).

Overall, the book sets out to achieve many objectives several of which it achieves quite well and its essential point, its theory on the Seventeenth century crisis, is by the end of the book so engrained into you and argued such that there leaves little doubt, at least on the key role of climate. Furthermore many of its flaws are the inevitable of a book of this size and scope that touches on all kinds of matters with the author stronger on some points (the role of the state, for instance) and much weaker on others (the history of ideas). There are also some quibbles of my own, there is little comparison between the Seventeenth century and other centuries and thus the question is not answered: What made the Seventeenth century unique, was the crisis a one-off or a reversion to a running historical pattern. A comparison with the Fourteenth century would here have been apt although I can hardly criticize this book for leaving stuff out given the wealth of information (although personally I would have left out a lot of the minutiae of high politics. It has been discussed before and a lot of it was not necessary). Furthermore, Parker is sometimes too uncritical with his sources. There are endless amount of contemporary quotes on the unique terribleness of the age which Parker uses to prove how terrible it really was, but people always say that about the period they live in, even now in the era of laptops and iphones you have people arguing about the unique awfulness of our epoch. Present-o-centrism is a very common human trait and so I would have preferred to see less quotes and more quantitative data and comparison. I am also suspicious of anyone who frames their argument using theories from Malcolm Gladwell. Yet these are not major concerns for the most part. The epilogue dealing with contemporary climate challenges is worth reading and sobering. 4 stars.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, aside from a broad and general history of the "General Crisis" of the 17th century, also introduced me to a historical debate I had little idea about. A group of British historians - first Eric Hobsbawm, and then Hugh Trevor-Roper, introduced and then elaborated on the "General Crisis" of the 17th century, which claimed to notice the abundance of violent revolts, wars, and natural disasters of the period. This has led to criticism by other historians who did not find anything out of the ordinary, and only called it "history".

Parker is in the former camp - he talks about a "fatal synergy" between short-term events and long-term causes. The latter cause is ... climactic events. To be more specific, the "Little Ice Age" which conventionally began in the late 16th century, of reduced temperatures, increased snowfall, and consequently lower agricultural yields across the globe. With less food, prices spiked, the lives of the population grew unstable, and wars and revolts were more likely to result.

The book is in five parts. Part I, "The Placenta of the Crisis", describes this in more detail. As the staple crops of cereals and rice suffered, states in the early modern turned to wars, enforcing of unpopular policies - a few were able to withstand the effects of global cooling. Parker refers to a "natural archive" of tree ring widths, ice cores, and sediment to discuss potential weather patterns. 'Composite' states of different regions or climates were disproportionately affected, as were cities and areas that were barely able to farm to begin with.

The next three parts are extensive in description, and list a dozen or so states that were affected by the "Little Ice Age" and "General Crisis". The format is fairly similar - first a background of famine or disastrous weather, and then a "tipping point". For the Ming Dynasty, that was the invasion by Manchus in the 1640s; for the Kingdom of France it was the Huguenot Revolt of 1629. To make a crude comparison, Parker is a chaos theorist, where small changes in starting parameters can lead to larger-scale and unpredictable results.

Part 3 is a study in contrast - where political entities were better able to weather the storm - either there is no evidence of such a famine, or more proactive policies to address in. In the former category, the Mughal Empire and sub-Saharan Africa, in the latter category, Tokugawa Japan.

Part 4 is about popular responses to the crisis - an outgrowth of print literature, or popular protest, and arguably the first "public sphere", of public debate and discussion.

The last part of the book is on the end of the "General Crisis" and the "fatal synergy" that produced it. Wars continued, but comparatively few revolts by the 1680s or 1690s. Parker then goes on to the changing role of the state, the potential concentration of state power, and the origins of the Scientific Revolution, before wading into another historical debate - the "Great Divergence" between Western Europe and East Asia, and where western European states grew wealthier than East Asian ones. Parker adds his own perspective - the lack of state support for scholarship and the application of scientific discoveries - I've heard some historians of Qing China take the argument seriously but I don't know if that is a more established opinion.

I can't evaluate the argument so well because it covers so much - and what I do know a little about, seems plausible. Although I should add that the first summary that I was told of the book, of "climate determinism", Parker's argument seems more diffuse. Climate variations can lead to harvest failure, and that combined with other factors and other disasters can lead to a new extreme hazard for states and people in them.

[Kevin Orrman-Rossiter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental in writing and research and staggering in its account of the seventeenth century little ice age. If you are pondering or denying the impact that a few degrees change in average temperature can have on the world - then read this. This is a rare book and if you are demanding the Readers Digest version or want it 'on a page' then you are missing the point.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there is something that Geoffrey Parker doesn't know about the 17th century, it must be because nobody else does. The sheer amount of research, scholarship and (for want of a better word) summarization that went into each paragraph, if not each sentence, just astounds me. I would read a sentence and think "well that knowledge would've taken me a few days to gather and collate." But the facts, conclusions and insights just keep coming.

The title gives it away: Parker has staked a claim that the crises of the 17th century that basically rocked all the civilized world at one time or another, could be tied in part to persistent weather developments that were out of the ordinary - floods, droughts, cold and typhoons. The examples he gives are hard to deny - from the Ming/Qing dynastic wars to the English rebellion. The common denominator is that the climate change caused a disruption in the way of things that are assumed to stay the same - crops, taxes from the crops, food distribution from the crops, new illnesses from malnutrition/plagues. How these disruptions are handled by the various polities is what determines whether the crisis can be weathered - or if it turns into a revolution, war or famine.

Parker gives well researched examples of leaders/governments that failed to do this at all (Charles I was really a failure all around) and those that were good at mitigation (the Japanese Tokugawa were exceptionally enlightened). It seems the main thing that it takes is that those in power realize that climate change can affect *everything* and cannot be ignored. A famine must be met head on and not used as an excuse for higher taxes (yes, many governments seemed to think that since tax revenues were going down, then higher taxes are the answer...). The regions that came out the best from the climate changes were those that concertedly saw the importance, did society-wide mitigation and held on through the crisis. The regions that declined were those that tried to score political points or outright ignored the suffering. That suffering climbed up fortune's ladder until no-one was immune - leaders toppled, countries invaded, populations wiped out.

Of course, these arguments are only academic and irrelevant to present times because we have enlightened leaders such as James Inhofe of Oklahoma who have recognized that the colossal importance of climate change to all the people of the world in the present and the future is secondary to profits of oil and coal companies of the next few years. Nope, nothing to learn from the horrendous history of the 17th century - Inhofe and his cronies think Santayana was a hippie rock group.

[Andres Felipe Contreras Buitrago · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro tiene tras de sí un trabajo de muchos años, contando una gran variedad de fuentes primarias y secundarias. El enfoque global es una cosa sorprendente, que se aborde australia y África es algo que muy poco se ve, el libro es largo, sí, y en varias ocasiones denso por la cantidad de información, pero, el lenguaje no es tan pesado y difícil de entender, es posible dilucidar las ideas principales de cada capítulo.

El libro dividido en cinco partes, que a su vez lo componen 22 capítulos, en el prólogo e introducción se nos describen las fuentes naturales y humanas para abordar el siglo XVII, allí se habla de la importancia del clima en la historia, y como la pequeña edad de hielo está relacionada con guerra, rebeliones y cambiós en el poder en todo el mundo.

La primera parte versa sobre la Crisis del siglo XVII, en ella se mencionan las lluvias torrenciales que desbordan ríos e inundan pueblos, fríos extremos que congelan varios lugares además de sequías extremas, todo ello lleva a una mala cosecha, que implica escasez de comida y por ende una hambruna, a lo que habría que añadir las erupciones volcánicas, los terremotos, la ausencia de manchas solares y un fenómeno del niño más extremo, llevando eso a las personas en buscar culpables en los pecados, en los astros o en personas como brujas o judíos, todo esos desastres llevan a la desnutrición y una reducción demográfica.

Otro factor de crisis son las guerras, el siglo XVII está llena de ellas, estás eran una guerras de muchas atrocidades en las que habían saqueos y asesinatos en masa, la violación de mujeres era lo más normal que había, el hacer la guerra era más costoso por los soldados profesionales y la artillería, hacia necesario una mayor victoria para conseguir más ganancias, por ello el alargue de las guerras, donde los monarcas absolutas estan entrenados desde pequeños para la guerra, para ellos es parte de su responsabilidad, donde la religión también los justifica, ahora estos monarcas también tiene validos para ayudarlos, una nueva nobleza.

Las ciudades es un lugar donde muchas personas van en momentos de crisis, pero estás no dan abasto del gran crecimiento urbano, la pobreza en estos lugares eran sin igual, donde la aglomeración hace que se propaguen más fácilmente enfermedades, las condiciones de higiene y ambientales eran malas, por ejemplo por el humo del carbón, habían ciudades y lugares muy dependientes de la importación de granos de otros lugares, el cese de esto suponía una grave crisis, otros lugares por el contrario, dependían de sus exportaciones de especialidad como el vino, si no hay ganancia de estos, dichos lugares no podían comprar alimentos.

El siglo XVII es un donde hay una gran reducción demográfica entre los factores se señalan el aumento de los suicidios, por múltiples razones, como lo duro de la vida o por vergüenza, las enfermedades también son otro factor, la viruela y la peste seguía matando a muchas personas que con el aumento urbano y nuevas cepas suponía más muertes. En aquella época hay menos nacimientos, las personas se casan tardíamente, muchas mamás mueren en el parto, o el hijo moría, era asesinado o entregado a la caridad donde muchas veces moría. Por último, está la migración, muchas personas van a otros lugares en busca de mejores oportunidades, también por efecto de la guerra o por el reclutamiento en el ejército que dejaba pueblos vacíos con solo mujeres.

La segunda parte, de centra en la crisis e historia de varios países en aquella época, todos ellos están atravesados por un clima adverso, sequías, lluvias, humedad y nevadas nunca antes vistas, que como se abordó anteriormente implican malas cosechas, que implica escasez, lo que lleva a una subida de lo precios. En china estamos ante la invacion por parte de los Qing frente a unos Ming que poco hicieron debido a su debilidad militar, los primeros en su gobierno tendrían dificultades que luego irían solucionando. En Rusia, está empieza a ascender como potencia por sus guerra contra Suecia y la mancomunidad polaco Lituania, el zar se hace con más poder, donde es visto como un defensor de los siervos que varías veces se levantan contra ministros, en aquella época Ucrania, se somete a Rusia, luego una revolución cosaca.

En el imperio Otomano, pese a las guerras previas vencidas empieza a tener ciertos reveses militares, en el que su problema de sucesión lleva a siempre problemas en la familia real lo que lleva a asesinatos y golpes de estado, en aquella época este imperio empezaría a distanciarse de Europa debido a que está última empezó a contar con mejores barcos, rifles, formaciones, fortificaciones y técnicas de guerra mejorada.

Alemania fue las más afectada en este siglo por la guerra de los treinta años, un lugar donde había muchas rebeliones por parte de católicos y protestantes, mucha población murió, los campos quedaron vacíos, mucha de su cultura se destruyó, luego se daría inicio a la segunda servidumbre, pese a todo, la paz de Westfalia beneficios a este país al darle más estabilidad, como con la libertad religiosa y la diplomacia. Suiza, Dinamarca y países bajos se beneficio de la guerra, pero luego tuvo que llevar a cabo reformas para recaudar impuestos llegando a generar molestias.

Los Españoles llevarían la peor parte de aquel siglo debido a la ineficiencia política, perdió varios territorios como Portugal, lugar donde nunca se vio con buenos ojos la unión de ambas coronas, la cuestión de colonial fue un tema que pocas veces España atendió, hay revueltas en Cataluña, Andalucía, Córdoba y Sevilla ante los nuevos impuestos para financiar guerras que España pierde.

Francia también estaba en estado de guerra, donde jueces y nobles apoyaron muchas veces las rebeliones contra los nuevos impuestos, sería el famoso rey sol, que traería consigo la estabilidad al reino al suprimir el protestantismo, el cual fue el que inicio guerras de religión en Francia, se dio a así mismo más poder y elimino todo rastro del pasado de las revoluciones.

En Inglaterra las revoluciones se llevaron a cabo ante una Escocia que no quería cambiar sus ritos tradicionales religiosos por una orden desde Inglaterra, cosa que también paso en Irlanda donde la población católica veía como eran amenazados por los protestantes, esto llevo a revueltas que pocas veces la corona pudo poner fin, por el contrario, debió de hacer concesiones, las revueltas llegaron a Inglaterra donde hubo una gran demanda de impresos y folletos, la guerra civil en las islas solo vio fin con la revolución gloriosa, Guillermo de Orange dio nuevas libertades y priorizó la empresa colonial además de devolverle el poder al parlamento ante un rey anterior muy impopular, Carlos.

La tercera parte es sobre cómo algunos lugares sobrevivieron y resistieron la Crisis del siglo, en la india mongola tenemos un lugar con grandes riquezas, que no lleva a cabo muchas guerra a excepción de Afganistán, en este lugar los cambios en la temperatura no afectaban tanto los cultivos, que eran resistentes, también se resistió la crisis con la importación de arroz, en aquella época la Irán safavira, gracias a sus pocas guerras, la exportación de seda y poca población resistió la crisis, aunque no había un gran poder central, ello se da cuenta en la libertad de cosas que se escriben, en estos lugares los neerlandés se harían del control de varias colonias, gracias a su organización y hombres más capacitados en la guerra, frente a unos portugueses incompetentes.

En Italia, Sicilia y Nápoles llevaron a a cabo grandes rebeliones, en la que Lombardía no actuó por su prospera industria y poca población, en los dos lugares el objetivo era el virrey y sus políticas de impuestos, se hicieron mucha concesiones por la flexibilidad y el espíritu de amistad y unión. En América los afectados de la crisis fueron los nativos debido a la pérdida de sus tierras frente a los colonos, y también por las muertes de las enfermedades traídas, aunque logran resistir, los colonos se ven afectados por las enfermedades tropicales de mosquitos, aunque en las colonias y virreinatos la diversificación de la economía y la escasez de población logran superar el embate.

En África se habla sobre la esclavitud como muchos de estos esclavos eran prisioneros de guerra o personas no gratas en sus tributos, en este continente y en Australia parecen haber pruebas de que si fueron afectados por la crisis, pero difícil llegar a una conclusión.

En Japón hay toda una pax Tokugawa, hay un crecimiento en las aldeas y un aumento urbano, las razones es que Japón estaba infra poblado y ahora había un poder central poderosos, lo que llegó también a no haber guerras, las mujeres evitaban tener hijos en los periodos más duros, para evitar otras crisis a futuro, se construyen graneros, se dan leyes para ahorrar y no consumir tanto, además se evita ciertos impuestos, esto tuvo un precio y fue el de la poca libertad política y la nula innovación militar.

La cuarta parte, versa sobre la forma de resistir ante la la hambruna, las guerras y los impuestos, la rebelión, llevada a cabo en fiestas religiosas y a principios de verano, donde varias veces las barreras naturales ayudaban a la protesta, siempre se advertía el objetivo de la rebelión antes de iniciarla, una vez inicia la violencia es selectiva contra los objetivos a atacar, aunque algunas veces se sale de las manos, los símbolos eran el rojo y líderes revolucionarios, las concesiones podían ser de cortó plazo, como escuchar individualmente a cada revolucionario, o concesiones permanentes, que son una victoria. Las armas de fuego importantes en las rebeliones, varias personas tenían, pero veteranos de guerras y rebeliones eran importantes para el liderazgo.

Hay tres grupos de personas importantes en las revueltas, tenemos una nobleza que si no es escuchada usa los impresos o las mismas revueltas para llevar a cabo sus intereses, pero no es muy común, ellos tenían más que perder en estás, estos ya tenían mucho poder. Por otra parte, tenemos licenciados, gente intelectual importante, donde los desempleados son los que lideran revoluciones. El clero, gracias a su poder son siempre los intermediarios en la protesta y las justifican con religión. En las revueltas se apela al pasado, a una edad de oro, se hacen analogías bíblicas, se usan textos de otros revolucionarios o se crean para justificar la insurrección, también se usa el futuro para justificar la protesta, ideas de un mesías.

Hay personas importantes en las revueltas y son aquellas se corren la voz de la misma, hay revolucionarios que van otros lugares, los impresos son importantes para conocer otras revueltas, hay así una esfera pública donde las personas semi alfabetas leen pasquines para informarse mejor sobre las insurrecciones, algunos países incluso las alientan o intervienen. En china las condiciones de los impresos es mucho mejor debió a los costos.

La última parte, finaliza en como afrontar la crisis, ante un sentimiento de melancolía, las personas recurren al suicidio, convertirse en monje, crear un jardín para escribir poesía, la lectura es otro pasatiempo, recurrir a Santos, escribir un diario para saber lo bueno y malo que hicieron las personas. También hay toda una oleada de consumo de sustancias psicoactivas, opio, café, té, alcohol, chocolate y tabaco, también se afronta la crisis con un sentimiento anti belicista, evitar la guerra, guardar silencio tras la paz.

Después de la guerra viene la reconstrucción, las granjas abandonadas, ahora son más fértiles, con lo que las personas que cultivan tienen mejores rendimientos, hay la introducción de nuevos cultivos y técnicas de cultivos, los lugares destruidos son reconstruidos con nuevas vías y canales, las personas consumen nuevos bienes, por lo que hay impuestos al consumo. El estado ahora invierte en graneros, y en ciertos tipos de aislamiento en caso de epidemias, además de llevar a cabo ayudas asistenciales.

En china ahora hay un mayor control de los impresos y el conocimiento, en Europa pese a que las universidades están en Crisis y hay censura, se desarrollan redes de información y conocimiento, se crean las academias, se lleva a cabo una revolución científica que tiene sus límites.

En las conclusiones se reafirman varios aspectos ya antes señalado, todo para dejar claro como el clima afecto dicho siglo, en el epílogo, se observa negacionistas del cambio climático y como este ya está afectado nuestra sociedad, dejando tras de sí mucha tragedia humana, donde los más afectados son los países pobres, aquí el estado, como en el pasado, es importante, para prevenir esos desastres, cosa que es más barata, y más con los avances científicos y tecnológicos de este siglo.

En conclusión un libro espectacular, tal vez el mejor libro para conocer el siglo XVII, desde una mirada global y climática, que es la pauta para estudiar más el clima en la historia, las ilustraciones y gráficas también muy buenas para comprender el libro.

[Jeffrey Cavanaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Left off reading this massive tome last year and finally picked it up again. Parker argues that the 17th-century crisis was exacerbated, if not caused outright, by a shift in climate termed the 'little ice age' by historians. The argument goes that vulnerable societies were led down the path of rebellion, revolution, and war during the era, largely due to terrible harvests that caused economic and social collapse, with some states faring better than others as s result of 'safety' valves to let off pressure or relative, for the 1600s, good government.

How good is the argument? Well, it fares better for some countries and not others, but that climatic conditions made the social unrest of the 17th-century much worse seems undeniable. Starving people, after all, are much less likely to take kindly to higher taxes than those that are eating on a regular basis.

If you like big, fat detail-rich history, this is a great book. If you are looking for concise, to-the-point social science, then know that it has a lot of flaws in that it is more history than pure hypothesis testing.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent book that looks at the social, cultural, and political impact of the Little Ice Age, and particularly the seventeenth century. One of the great things about this book is that Parker doesn't limit himself to Western Europe--he spends a good percentage of the book commenting on circumstances in Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, and Ming/Qing China. He also devotes some time to Australia, Africa and the Americas, though as he points out, the historical record for those areas is limited. But with scientific advances like ice cores, tree ring chronologies and pollen samples, it's possible to build up a picture of the climactic devastation involved, and the results are almost uniformly grim. It's a significant, eye-opening book, and one that can serve as a dramatic warning for anyone willing to pay attention.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptional history book about a known, but little discussed, period of 17th century history known as the "Little Ice Age". Professor Parker goes into great detail about the havoc that climate change caused on the nations of the world. This is a thick and fascinating read that does not have a boring page. Don't let the length of the book scare you away. It is worth the time and the investment to read.

[Ricardo Cebrián · Rating 5 out of 5]

He leído ya bastantes libros de historia y creo que este es uno de los más completos y entretenidos que me he encontrado hasta ahora. Un libro que te lleva desde España hasta China pasando por la India sin pestañear para mostrarte todo lo que pudo salir mal y salió mal en una época tormentosa.
Muy recomendado.

[Thom DeLair]

"All over the world, strangers talk only about the weather"
-Strange Weather by Tom Waits

Parker's monumental work looks at the 'General Crisis' of the seventeenth century in a global perspective. I've never read such a thorough that attempted capture the generational transformations on such a large scale. The central narrative is that the ebb of the Little Ice Age, with no sun spots, El Nino activity and volcanic eruptions cause colder temperatures during the seventeenth century. Parker paints a grim picture without a brush to apply a silver lining. Colder climates lead to food shortages, which lead to social instability, which lead to collapses or at least serious challenges seventeenth century states. Also according to Parker this increased infanticide and suicide.

According to Parker's analysis, states that knew their limits (Japan, Mughal India, Persia)

[Luis Rodríguez Álvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si el cometido de la historia es no repetir los errores pasados, este libro es absolutamente imprescindible en los tiempos que corren. Diez años después de su publicación, todo se está cumpliendo tal y como ocurría en el siglo XVII. Cambio climático, problemas de abastecimiento, desengaño político, revoluciones... Después de esto, sólo puedo preguntarme: ¿hablaremos en el futuro de la crisis del siglo XXI como se habla ahora de la del XVII?

[Henry Winser]

Good intro for me to 17th century history, wide ranging and with some really interesting climate analysis. Slightly less convincing on some of the specifics as it has to rush on quite quickly due to the breadth of the material

[Benjamin Anders, PhD History and Political Theory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geoffrey Parker Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

This is a large and densely narrated work offering a global history of war and civil unrest in the seventeenth century in service of a particular thesis. I will address that thesis in a moment, but before I do so, it is worth stating why I consider this work worth reading, as the answer to that question is only loosely connected with Parker’s central argument. The book offers a penetrating analysis of war, rebellion, disease, famine and dislocation across an entire century; it is a summa of its author’s lifetime of profound learning, a career which began with a pathbreaking study of sixteenth and seventeenth century military technology and has included many fine works of early modern history and biography. Global Crisis ultimately stands as a meditation on the nature of man’s suffering and his uncertain struggle for personal security and political dignity. It is a richly sourced and sensitive work which documents life and death trials in a century that saw both ferocious conflict over theological dogmas and the emergence of recognizably modern science. For me, the result was riveting.

Now, what is the Global Crisis, and how does Parker seek to explain it? Between 1600 and 1700, most demographers believe, our planet lost around a third of its human population. Many prior historians have made efforts to explain this fact. Some emphasize the global monetary inflation brought about by the import of silver and gold from Latin America to Eurasia. Other scholars focus on an increasingly confiscatory state that expanded the tax burden on the peasant to insufferable degrees in order to fund its wars. Still others blame savage sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Finally, one argument holds that the crisis was ultimately produced by the growth of the peasant population without adequate expansion of the food supply. For Parker, none of these explanations are universal enough to explain the global nature of the seventeenth century crisis, which saw massive wars and rebellions in China, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire as well as in Western Europe.

In order to fill the void, Parker proposes the most universal explanation of all: global ecological change. Parker traces the spate of wars, disease, and famine that characterized the seventeenth century ultimately to reduced sunspot activity, increased volcanic eruptions, and particularly bad El Nino weather–all of which combined to produce a century that contained many of the coldest winters on record. This global cooling emerged at a terrible time in the world’s demographic history when the human population had recovered from the devastation of the Black Death three centuries prior. The population was beginning to grow at an unsustainable rate for an era which had not begun the process of agricultural improvement that would characterize the eighteenth century. The global cooling created a negative feedback loop: poor harvests precipitated rebellions, wars, and civil strife. These wars and rebellions naturally disrupted further harvests, which in turn compounded the effects of the global cooling’s devastation by diminishing the food supply even further. War brought disease, banditry, and hunger. Parker refers to this negative feedback loop as “negative compound interest”--a process whereby generations of people were repeatedly reduced in their population and consequently married later, were less healthy, and produced fewer offspring with poorer survival rates.

These harrowing facts are presented in a well honed structure that supports the argument but also tells a gripping story. The first chapters analyze the social history of the crisis thematically, tackling themes such as the growth of phenomena like children given up for adoption, suicides, rapes, infanticide, and violent killings. Each of these accounts is deeply affecting, and Parker liberally quotes his sources to draw a deeply human picture of growing disorder and suffering. Particularly affecting are the stories he recounts about the conditions of early modern orphanages in Western Europe, where as many as half of the malnourished children did not reach adulthood. Parker also discusses some of the strategies differing societies used to contain the effects of the crisis such as intentionally consuming less food, delaying marriage, forcing adult children to live with parents longer, confining women to nunneries, infanticide, and banishment of the poor and indigent from villages, families, and communities. Parker never loses sight of the humanity of those about whom he writes. What in the hands of a less able historian might have been a grim recitation of facts is Parker’s telling of a subtle human drama. He finds revealing quotations from his sources and powerful stories to narrate from the abundance of material he assembles. Much of this is deeply evocative of profound suffering–a landlady assures a poor urban woman that it is better to become a prostitute than “steal and be hanged” while a Catalan diarist records orphaned children “lost wandering about the city begging.” He further laments “the poor women who were pregnant in this time…if they were in the last day of their term all they could do was commend themselves to God, as so many of them died and their babies died with them.”

The thematic chapters are followed by the real meat of the book, which is a series of narratives documenting wars, rebellions, and revolutions across the seventeenth century. In all of these Parker considers the instability of global cooling to have played an important role. Each narrative chapter is powerful. We are treated to an incredible depiction of the Ming Qing transition in China, a civil war which began as a rebellion of the Chinese peasants against viciously high taxation and eventually weakened the Ming dynasty, allowing the Northern Manchus to take power and establish the final Chinese dynasty. We witness the Ottoman Empire endure two regicides, three depositions of sultans, and a number of rebellions in Constantinople and more far flung territories in the space of fifty years, all driven in Parker’s view by a series of droughts that global climate change inflicted on the Anatolian inland, where in some places over half of rural villages disappeared. Russian history, which saw in the seventeenth century decades of famine and rebellion, reducing its population by nearly a quarter, also receives its own narrative. Remarkably, the Tsarist system survives a series of peasant rebellions–some driven ideologically by the ‘Old Believer’ Orthodox Christians who opposed liturgical reforms introduced by the Tsar–as well as a series of wars with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which resulted in the tragic capture of a briefly independent Ukrainian state by the Tsar. More familiar stories are told from Western Europe, of the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the French Fronde Rebellion, as well as the story of a Catalan rebellion against Philip II in which Louis XIV briefly intervened. From here, Parker transitions to societies that, though also affected by the crises, were slightly more effective in providing relief to their people: the Indian Mughals who set up charitable “free feeding houses” for their famished people and the Tokagawa Japanese whose peasantry responded to famine conditions with an “industrious revolution.” In this industrious revolution, the Japanese peasants increased their labor hours in the fields in response to famine, rather than reducing them to save calories as was the understandable customary response of some peasant communities to famine. The result was a marginally improved output.

Parker concludes the book with another series of thematic chapters–first on the three classes of people who rebelled against the political order of the seventeenth century, the poor and famished, intellectuals and religious sectarians, and “people hoping for a change,” a group that includes aggrieved aristocrats, furious members of guilds and other associations, and again the common mass of peasants and the urban underclass.

The final two chapters deal first with the escape from the seventeenth century, on which point Parker is not entirely convincing in forwarding his argument that the crisis had ultimately ecological causes. More or less, and particularly in Western Europe and China, political stability was re-built brick by brick. In Europe, new political regimes were less committed to uncompromising religious zealotry and persecution. In China, the state returned to Confucian values as it tended in periods after major rebellions and dynastic change. As a result, China began taking a far less oppressive tax burden from its peasantry in the early Qing period. Amidst these enormous political changes, poor weather and bad harvests continued into the end of the century. Nevertheless, by the 1680s the spate of global upheaval had more or less died down.

What this suggests to me is that the causes of rebellion and war are ultimately dynamic and not mechanical even in the worst of times. No amount of loss–whether experienced by the already poor or the relatively rich–is enough on its own to inevitably lead to conflict. A cursory look at the vicious abuse, humiliation, and tyranny man has endured quietly and with resignation in the course of his history amply confirms this. I suspect the reasons why some people respond to humiliation and deprivation with resignation while others resist, often hopelessly, will always remain mysterious, as it famously was to David Hume.

What I do feel is this, a particular and ultimately contingent set of long festering grievances, destabilizing ideas, religious conflicts, and only then a series of famines and climatic events, made the seventeenth century as riven with war as it was. The reasons so many conflicts emerged at once are not wholly random but more correlational than Parker would suggest. Moreover, if one were to catalog the wars and rebellions of the sixteenth century, or write a history of the Hundred Years War and the Black Death in the fourteenth century, as Jonathan Sumpiton has, one could tell an equally terrible story of human misery, cruelty, and folly as one could for the seventeenth century. Parker, consummately erudite historian that he is, seems aware of provoking this criticism and emphasizes over and over that the level of human devastation captured by his statistics far outstretches the prior two centuries of European history and the following two as well.

As far as I know, this is true. I have no inclination to doubt Parker is right. Nevertheless, I am not sure this comparison is enough to prove that the climate was the primary cause of the conflagration rather than a secondary cause that worsened the results of constant war, over taxation, and savage religious hatreds. If so, that at least raises the question of whether this case is unique or if some significant percentage of other major human tragedies can be explained primarily by climate. I know of no similar explanation for the outbreak of World War I, for instance, though a growing tendency in the historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire suggests worsening climatic conditions played a major role in its demise. It seems that the closer human events get to our own lives, the more willing we are to accept the proposition that those events are caused by free human action.

Indeed, it seems to me that what mattered at least as much as the climate in producing the crisis of the seventeenth century was the inability of the political leadership of many of the societies in question to respond productively to the dislocation. Parker is actually wonderfully insightful on this point and refers again and again to the foibles of the century’s political rulers. All of the historical trends went in the wrong direction. Royal absolutism of a more uncompromising kind was being pushed on resistant societies. Kings ignored traditional institutions like representative assemblies, ancient courts of law, and aristocratic privileges and traditional peasant rights alike in an effort to govern more nakedly through the force of their will. The compunction on the part of sovereigns to make war on each other constantly combined with war’s tendency in the period to grow ever more expensive as a result of ongoing revolutions in military technology and organization. This raised the tax burden on the peasantry insufferably, which made every famine far more devastating as families had their harvests stolen from them. This dynamic destroyed the peasants' incentives to improve their agricultural techniques when improvements were most needed. Here emerges a dynamic known to every student of the killing fields which the Communists blithely called “collective farms”: when governments rob peasants blind, savage them with killing, rape, and coercion, and deprive them of the opportunity to improve their lot through creativity and initiative a compounding cascade of hunger and misery is the inevitable result. The view that prosperity is the result of the confiscation of wealth, for whatever reason, rather than its creation, does not survive the most cursory scrutiny.

The seventeenth century rebellions were driven ultimately by ideas and the impact of ideas on human action. An uncompromising conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Western Europe transformed every war between Christian kings into an unforgiving struggle for God rather than an earthly political dispute. The advent of the printing press allowed seditious ideas, some based in strange forms of religious heterodoxy and others at the cusp of a massive scientific advance, to spread more rapidly than before. Ultimately it was this coming together of political transition, ideological ferment, and technological and as well as organizational change that made the series of famines and frigid winters result in a global conflagration. I do not think Parker at his best would dispute this conclusion, but at times he seems to suggest a more mechanical approach where human actors are mere puppets manipulated by the climate..

Though I do have doubts about the thesis of this book, at least if it is advanced at the expense of other important causes of the crisis of the seventeenth century, I absolutely think you should read it. The book is a profound narrative of an entire century of military, economic, and social history which provides an in-depth picture of an entire era. Parker’s deep powers of empathy and imagination make what could have in other hands been a dry monograph into a riveting human drama and sacrifices not an ounce of scholarly rigor in doing so. The sheer amount of primary and secondary material assembled in this book, and the confidence and verve of the narrative that weaves it together into a seamless whole, are truly astounding. I’m sure Parker has earned the envy of his colleagues, for he is a born storyteller. He draws the reader as deep into the life-world of at least twelve distinct societies in the seventeenth century as one is likely to get.

[Ashton Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Long live the king, death to the bad government"

[Brent Ranalli · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, I didn’t read the whole book. I just came off of Geoffrey Parker’s “Europe in Crisis 1698-1648,” which covers a lot of the same territory (and uses many of the same descriptions and examples). I skipped around in this one, read the parts that interested me most. It’s a very readable book, and a valuable contribution to global environmental & political history.

In the Prologue, Parker lists other past climatic disruptions that have affected human societies on a global scale. He mentions the “drought on both sides of the Pacific” that fatally weakened the Tang in China and the Maya in Central America, and cites an article that speculates that changing monsoon patterns may have had something to do with it. In fact, we know better than that, though neither Parker nor the Nature study author seems to be aware of it. Not to fault Parker, who had lots of other information to keep track of, but “Catastrophe,” by David Keys, sets out a very convincing case for environmentally-induced climate effects (not caused by monsoons) that disrupted not only the Tang and the Maya but many civilizations throughout both hemispheres—the “dark ages,” as we call it.

[Yefim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The amount of work that has gone into this book is impressive, but the conclusion is rather flimsy. The premise of the book seems to be that climate change (specifically, the Little Ice Age) was the primary cause of both the troubles of the 17th century (the Ming-Qing transition, the 30 Years' War, the English Civil War, the Deluge in Poland, the Cossack Rebellion, the Fronde, the end Spain as a global power, etc), and the subsequent change. I am not convinced. While repeated harvest failures did lead to famines, which lead to food riots and uprisings, the primary cause of social instability seemed to be constant warfare, and the need for new and heavier taxes to pay for large standing armies on a scale unseen since Roman times. The Little Ice Age certainly contributed to the peoples' inability to pay those taxes (or, indeed, to pay for food in times of famine), the climate seems to me to be a contributing, rather than a causative factor.

Still a very interesting book, though

[Matthew Tyas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thorough look at the events of the 17th century and the impact global cooling may have had in precipitating and amplifying them. It sits somewhere between a popular history book and one written only for historians.

It’s very long, touches on many events only very lightly, but quotes many sources and makes clear the suffering and hardships of the day.

I don’t know that I fully recommend it, as it’s very long, but it is very well researched and written. A great jumping in point to the period that makes me want to read more about the time.

[Matthew Stienberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simply masterful historical review of the crisis and reactions to climate change, war, and disease in the 17th century. All encompassing, brilliantly researched and all to relevant to our times! The specter of climate change looms long over this century and a study of how it has impacted our ancestors could be crucial in minimizing the potential pitfalls and problems faced by both ourselves and our descendants.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was disappointing. The first third provided great setup with a good overview of 17th century history, but the rest failed to deliver on the promised thesis. Rather than showing that climate change drove the Global Crisis, Parker merely demonstrates that climate change exacerbated existing conflicts and trends. It's worth reading for the first section; I wouldn't keep going after that.

[Pieter Serrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wil je een sterke, erudiete wereldgeschiedenis van de zeventiende eeuw van een tophistoricus? Lees dit boek. Ben je op zoek naar een meeslepend verhaal, laat het liggen. Vooral erg sterk in de inleiding (eerste honderd pagina´s) en slotbeschouwingen (laatste honderdvijftig).
Uitgebreide review volgt dit najaar in G Geschiedenis magazine.

[Alistair Antonopoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this book is an excellent overview of the 17th century, and covers the events, revolutions, uprisings, and cultural developments from the Spanish Empire in the Americas to the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan.
Parker makes a very convincing argument for the role of climate change in the increased frequency of revolts and revolutions during this period, albeit not the only driver of these events, which also relate to the fundamental changes in the world economy that were occurring at the time. Parker also draws interesting parallels with how modern governments are dealing with climate change, although in this final section he focuses almost exclusively on the US and some mention of the UK, that said, this book is not meant as an exhaustive discussion of modern climate change mitigation, so I cannot hold that against him. He also makes strong arguments for the essential role of central government and welfare in the mitigation of climate change and the value or prevention, citing the Thames barrier as a fitting example.
However, Parker also however, makes the "Great Divergence" part of his thesis, and argues that it was different responses to crisis that drove this. However, I feel here that Parkers arguments are weaker. For example, while it is true to say that Western scientific and technological development sped up and eventually exceeded that of East, West, and South Asia, this was the reversal of a long trend wherein those areas had been technologically and culturally dominant, in alternation with each other, for some 1000 years. Furthermore, while Parker is correct to argue that certain institutions such as modern universities and learbed societies did directly contribute to this scientific development in Western Europe, what he neglects to mention (although one could argue that it lies beyond the 17th century) is the way in which this initial improvement in technology and scientific knowledge was used. He hints at it when he mentions how the first word that Crusoe teaches his man Friday is "Master", the manner in which Western Europe translated its developments in technology directly to the exploitation, and eventual domination of much of the world, which in itself in a large part accounts for today's disparities, and those that were more pronounced in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In support of this theory of the great divergence Parker can also make glaring errors. For example, he begins a chapter on learning and literacy in the Muslim world by citing the example of a French merchant in Senegal, who claims that few except the Marabouts know how to read. He then extrapolates the example of Senegal to the whole Muslim world saying that it is reasonable to assume this was the case everywhere. This is utterly bizarre as Senegal was, and is, on the periphery of the Muslim world, and even more so in the 17th century, and not remotely indicative of life and learning in Egypt or Iraq. Parker then discredits this himself by going on the list multiple examples of literature and learning in the Ottoman and Mughal empires that between them must hold some 50% of the worlds Muslims at the time, if not more.
Finally, Parker also fails to, in my opinion, delineate the difference between the Ottoman Manchu and Mughal empires, and European emerging nation states of the time, in the fact that all 3 empires were effectively cases of nomadic or semi nomadic warrior elites that were considered foreign by the majority of their subjects, and in the functioning of such as state was primarily extractivist and tributary, rather than one with rudimentary concepts of citizenship and participation, largely due to being dominated by essentially foreign elites with little interest in anything other than preserving their power.
Nonetheless overall a good overview of the period and I would recommend it.

[Nosemonkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is vast in both size and ambition. The 850+ page paperback is a good couple of inches thick, uncomfortably heavy to hold, with big pages full of small text. At a standard size of paper and font, this is probably more like 1,500.

And then there's the scope of what this covers: Pretty much the entire planet over a hundred years of war, plague, famine and death - with a conclusion drawing parallels to and lessons for the present day.

To be honest, after a while it all becomes a bit much. The chapters focused on individual countries - giving fairly standard narrative Overviews of what happened, with a few suggestions about why - were, for me, the most engaging, and mostly well done. The more thematic chapters were interesting - showing similarities in events and responses in often wildly different parts of the world - but raised more questions than they answered. And after a while the sheer volume of information becomes little more than white noise - following the thread of the argument becomes harder and harder with the weight of evidence being supplied to support whatever the argument is at that moment in time.

The biggest issue with this is that it means the central premise - that climate change was in part a cause, in part a catalyst for the crises of of 17th century - gets a little lost in amongst all the detail. Parker's real point seems to be to show that in an era of extreme climate conditions, social cohesion breaks down harder and faster than it might otherwise have done. This seems plausible. But he's too good a historian to make this point without caveats - and the more detail he piles on, the more caveats emerge. While he shows some commonalities between crises and countries, there are so many of them it's hard to see if this actually means anything - is it correlation, coincidence, causation? Who knows?

What is clear is that this is one of those books destined to be dubbed "a monumental achievement". It may not wholly succeed in it's goal of putting climate change at the centre of the crises of the 17th century - but as a single-volume overview of those crises, it's certainly impressive.

[A M Booth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Churchill once began a letter to Roosevelt with the line "I am sorry to write you a long letter, but I don't have time to write a shorter one."

The paradox of course is that you need to plan carefully for a shorter letter.

This is advice I wish Geoffrey parker had taken here. The book is simply too long .

Parker sets out to write the ultimate book of the 17th century and to be fair he covers every part of the globe in trying to link the malign weather of the age to the general political crisis that afflicted many areas from England to China.

However the book is enormous at well over 1200 pages and by the end I felt bludgeoned into submission and I just wanted to end it. I skimmed the last quarter in a couple of days as a result.

He needed to set out a theoretical model and then explain how the parts worked in so many countries but not in others.

Basically the model seems to be.

1) climate was very benign in the 16th century and so populations rose in many areas
2) states grew larger and more complex in this period.
3) there was no real international system to regulate foreign relations.

Then in the 17th century 2 big things happened.
1) a much worse climate reduced harvests and forced famine in many areas.
2) complex states were more prone to go to war with each other.

These 2 things then fed off each other to weaken 17th century states - poor harvests caused famines and reduced tax takes whilst constant wars caused destruction and more costs .

Many states struggled to cope - Ming China, the Habsburgs, Stuart Britain and bourbon France, Poland. Some of these collapsed, others were permanently weakened and others only just survived a near century of war and revolution.

The big exception was Japan because all the factors above were the opposite for Japan (rubbish 16th century, strong govt, and no foreign wars).