Global Crisis
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Nevertheless, the 1680s saw the end of several conflicts. The ‘Eternal Peace of Moscow’ in 1686 marked the permanent ascendancy of Russia over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; while in 1683, Manchu troops finally defeated the last of their opponents, allowing a government inspector to exult that the Qing emperor ‘has crushed all the rebels and even the seas are calm. At present, the people have returned to their former lands. Their homes are protected and their livelihood is secure. They will respect and honour Your Majesty's benevolence for generations to come.‘10 China's seventeenth-century crisis had ended at last. Meanwhile, in Boston, Massachusetts, Increase Mather (preacher at the North Church in Boston and president of Harvard College) warned the world that the brilliant comets that appeared in 1680 and 1682 ‘are the presages of great calamities at hand’. Little did he know that these two comets would be the last ‘fearful sights and signs in heaven’ of the age.11
Nevertheless, although both political upheavals and comets became less frequent, the Little Ice Age continued. In the northern hemisphere, 9 of the 14 summers between 1666 and 1679 were either cool or exceptionally cool – harvests in western Europe ripened later in 1675 than in any other year between 1484 and 1879 – and climatologists regard the extreme climatic events and disastrous harvests during the 1690s, with average temperatures 1.5°C below those of today, as the ‘climax of the Little Ice Age’. This time, global cooling did not produce a wave of revolutions. The fatal synergy had been broken. This book ends by examining why.12
Writing global history is not easy. In 2011 Alain Hugon prefaced his study of the revolt of Naples in 1647–8 by noting that, although ‘contemporaries clearly stated that no barriers separated the various revolutions of the seventeenth century’, nevertheless ‘We historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries dare not study them in their totality, despite our awareness of this synchronicity, of the interdependence, and of the interactions that occurred’. Hugon reported that whenever he ‘tried to make historical comparisons appropriate to the mid-seventeenth century, the problems that arise from the need to contextualize each historical event render the attempt vain’.13
It is easy to sympathize with this view. On the one hand, recent research has revealed both far more ‘historical events’ than previous scholars had imagined – Hugon himself uncovered evidence of over 100 revolts in the kingdom of Naples in 1647–8; over 20 towns and cities in Andalusia took part in the ‘Green Banner Revolts’ of 1648–52; almost half the communities of Portugal followed Évora into rebellion in 1637 – and far broader participation in many of the events already known (over a million Chinese joined the ‘roving bandits’ in the 1630s; perhaps a million people perished in France's Fronde revolt, 1648–53). On the other hand, although almost all regions of the northern hemisphere experienced both the Little Ice Age and the General Crisis in the mid-seventeenth century, each did so in different ways, for different reasons, and with different outcomes – not least because some structural causes (such as climate change) lie largely beyond human control, while others (such as wars and revolutions) involve so many people that they lie largely beyond the control of any individual. Nevertheless, modern historians must emulate the global vision of contemporaries of the Crisis and, as we ‘contextualize each historical event’, try to identify what united as well as what separated the victims.
A second problem in explaining the synchronicity, the interdependence and the interactions of the various revolutions is the role played by contingency. Minor events repeatedly produced consequences that were both unanticipated and disproportionate. As Dr Samuel Johnson observed:
It seems to be almost the universal error of historians to suppose it politically, as it is physically true, that every effort has a proportionate cause. In the inanimate action of matter upon matter, the motion produced can be but equal to the force of the moving power; but the operations of life, whether private or publick, admit no such laws. The caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation. It is not always that there is a strong reason for a great event.14
Dr Johnson's warning requires historians to identify the precise moment in each revolution when ‘the motion produced’ was no longer ‘equal to the force of the moving power’, and ‘the caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation’. Scholars used to describe this as ‘the turning point’, and recently John Lewis Gaddis adopted from physics the term ‘phase transitions’: the moment ‘where water begins to boil or freeze, for example, or sand piles begin to slide, or fault lines begin to fracture’. I prefer another term, the ‘tipping point’, a metaphor popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, because it implies that such changes, however sudden and dramatic, may one day be reversed. Ice, after all, can easily turn back to water.15
This book studies the Global Crisis of the mid-seventeenth century through three different lenses. Part I presents evidence from both the human and natural archives to identify the channels by which the crisis impinged on humankind. Chapter 1 examines how global cooling affects the supply of food, above all of staple crops such as cereals and rice, around the world. Chapter 2 evaluates how the policies pursued by early modern states interacted with these climate changes, for example by waging wars that intensified economic hardship and by pursuing unpopular policies that destabilized societies already under economic stress, or (more rarely) by adopting initiatives that mitigated the consequences of global cooling. Chapter 3 examines four zones where a disproportionate number of key events of the mid-seventeenth century occurred: composite states; cities; marginal lands; and ‘macroregions’. Composite states, normally created by dynastic unions, were vulnerable because the ruler's authority was often weaker in peripheral areas than elsewhere; yet in wartime, precisely because they were on the periphery, these areas experienced greater political and economic pressure and often rebelled first. Global cooling gravely affected the other three zones – cities, marginal lands and macroregions – because they relied disproportionately on the yield of crops vulnerable to climate change. In addition, cities regularly suffered both fiscal and military calamities because both governments and armies targeted places that boasted a large, compact population. For the same reasons, macroregions (densely populated areas that concentrated on producing goods for export rather than for local consumption) were also especially vulnerable to political and military changes – not just at home, but also in those areas on which they were economically dependent for imports or exports. Chapter 4 examines the demographic responses by the victims in different regions as the crisis increased an imbalance between supply and demand for resources – an imbalance that would eventually reduce the global population by perhaps one-third.
The chapters in Part II examine a dozen states in Eurasia that experienced the full intensity of both the Little Ice Age and the General Crisis in the mid-seventeenth century, proceeding geographically from east to west: China; Russia and Poland; the Ottoman empire; Germany and Scandinavia; the Dutch and Swiss Republics; the Iberian Peninsula; France; Great Britain and Ireland. Each chapter charts the interplay of human and natural forces right up to the ‘tipping point’ that ended the existing social, economic and political equilibrium; it then analyses the nature of the ensuing crisis; and, finally, it documents the emergence of a new equilibrium.
The choice of an east-to-west itinerary, starting with China, is arbitrary – it reflects neither chronological differences (in most cases the ‘days of shaking’ began in or around 1618 and ended in the 1680s) nor the intensity of the crisis (although in terms of physical and personal damage, China and Ireland seem to have suffered worst of all). By contrast, the decision to devote greater space to the experience of Britain and Ireland than to other states gripped by major trauma is deliberate. In the words of Christopher Hill, perhaps the most perceptive modern historian of the subject, ‘The middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain’.16 Moreover, the ‘upheaval’ lasted longer, and produced more dramatic changes, than anywhe
re else except China. However, the wealth of surviving British and Irish sources permits a more detailed understanding of the causes, course and consequences of the crisis than is possible for any other society. Chapter 11 therefore charts the path to state breakdown in England, Scotland and Ireland between 1603, when they became a single state, and 1642, when the failure of his policies forced King Charles I to flee his capital. Chapter 12 examines the consequences of the prolonged wars and multiple regime changes in the three kingdoms between 1642 and 1660, including the first formulation of democratic principles now regarded as central to Western society; the attempts by the central government to overthrow them between 1660 and 1688; and their limited resurrection after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9.
Part III considers two categories of ‘exception’ to this pattern: those areas where at least part of the population apparently emerged from the seventeenth-century trauma relatively unscathed (some European colonies in America; South and Southeast Asia; Japan); and those regions where the impact of the Little Ice Age remains ambiguous (the Great Plains of North America; Sub-Saharan Africa; Australia). Within the first category, in Mughal India and some of its neighbours, abundant resources enabled the state to ride out the crisis (chapter 13); while in Spanish Italy, the government managed to overcome major rebellions by making major concessions (chapter 14). Elsewhere, notably in Europe's overseas outposts, the prosperity of a few (the European colonists) was achieved only at the expense of the many (the indigenous population: chapter 15). Only Tokugawa Japan seems to have avoided the full effects of the crisis as the result of human initiatives: although global cooling caused a major famine in the archipelago during the 1640s, a barrage of effective countermeasures first limited and then repaired the damage (chapter 16).
Despite the remarkable diversity of human experience in the states and societies afflicted by the General Crisis, some striking common denominators emerge, and Part IV considers three of them. First, popular responses to catastrophe exhibited a number of similar protocols and conventions, ranging from a surprising measure of restraint in violent protests around the world to striking similarities in what James C. Scott termed ‘the weapons of the weak’: ‘foot-dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage’ (chapter 17).17 Second, an investigation of the individuals and groups in different societies who exploited the mounting instability to produce a ‘tipping point’ also exposes similarities. In many areas aristocrats played a prominent role, as they had done in many earlier crises; but in the mid-seventeenth century, from China through the Muslim world to Europe, the most prominent ‘troublemakers’ included men (some clerical, others secular) who had made great sacrifices to acquire advanced education but then failed to find suitable employment (chapter 18). A third common denominator is the ease with which radical ideas developed and spread. Proliferation sometimes occurred because insurgents travelled directly from one area to spread information and seditious ideas. Thus in 1647 the transfer of news between Naples and Palermo synchronized the rebellions in the two capitals; while the following year, in Russia, many towns rebelled as soon as their citizens returned from Moscow and described the rioting there that had forced the tsar to make massive concessions. More often, ideas spread because the proliferation of printed works and of schools had created a literate proletariat of unprecedented size in much of Asia and Europe, capable of reading, discussing and implementing new ideas. Thus although the Catholics of Ireland hated and feared the Calvinists of Scotland, they were prepared to learn from them. A few days after the 1641 uprising, when a captured Protestant asked a leading Irish Catholic: ‘“What? Yow have made a Covenant amongst yow as the Scotts did?” “Yea”, said hee, “The Scotts have taught us our A. B. C.”’ (chapter 19).18
Finally, Part V examines how the survivors coped with the crisis and its aftermath, and how their choices shaped a new equilibrium that emerged in various states and regions. Although the 1690s and 1700s saw further bouts of extreme weather, famine and (in Europe and China) almost continuous war, unlike the 1640s and 1650s, no revolutions and relatively few revolts occurred. So although the Little Ice Age continued, the General Crisis did not. Several changes help to explain this paradox. Throughout the northern hemisphere, massive depopulation encouraged elites to control migration: groups that had rigorously excluded newcomers now welcomed them; states that had allowed freedom of movement now sought to bind their subjects to the land (chapter 20). In most parts of the globe, the experience of state breakdown, and the ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’, cooled the ardour of many advocates of economic, political and religious change, leading to greater political stability, economic innovation and religious toleration. It also led many governments to switch resources from warfare to welfare, fostering economic regeneration (chapter 21). Finally, chapter 22 examines a variety of intellectual responses devised to cope more effectively with future crises, some (like compulsory universal schooling) imposed by the state, others emerging among subjects – including ‘practical knowledge’ in China and Japan, the ‘new reason’ in Mughal India and the ‘Scientific Revolution’ in Europe. For various reasons, these innovations put down deeper roots in the West than elsewhere and formed a crucial ingredient in the ‘Great Divergence’ between East Asia and Northwest Europe that later developed.
The Conclusion considers some implications of recognizing that, far from being an aberration, ‘catastrophe’ forms an integral part of human history, while the Epilogue suggests that the current debate on ‘global warming’ confuses two distinct issues: whether human activity is making the world warmer; and whether or not sudden climate change can occur. Although some may still legitimately question the first, the seventeenth-century evidence places the second beyond doubt. The critical issues are not whether climate change occurs, but when; and whether it makes better sense for states and societies to invest money now to prepare for natural disasters that are inevitable – hurricanes in the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of North America; storm surges in the lands around the North Sea; droughts in Africa; prolonged heatwaves – or instead wait to pay the far higher costs of inaction.
PART I
THE PLACENTA OF THE CRISIS
THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR VOLTAIRE WAS THE FIRST to write about a Global Crisis in the seventeenth century. His Essay on the customs and character of nations, and on the principal facts of history from Charlemagne to Louis XIII, composed in the 1740s for his friend, the Marquise du Châtelet (who, although an eminent mathematician, found history boring), set the wars and rebellions a century earlier within a global framework. Thus, after describing the murder of an Ottoman sultan in 1648, Voltaire immediately noted:
This unfortunate time for Ibrahim was unfortunate for all monarchs. The Holy Roman Empire was unsettled by the famous Thirty Years’ War. Civil war devastated France and forced the mother of Louis XIV to flee with her children from her capital. In London, Charles I was condemned to death by his own subjects. Philip IV, king of Spain, having lost almost all his possessions in Asia, also lost Portugal.
Voltaire went on to consider the careers of Cromwell in England, Li Zicheng in China, Aurangzeb in India, and others who had seized power by force, concluding that the mid-seventeenth century had been ‘a period of usurpations almost from one end of the world to the other’.1
Voltaire's Essay repeatedly stressed the global dimension of the crisis: ‘In the flood of revolutions which we have seen from one end of the universe to the other, a fatal sequence of events seems to have dragged people into them, just as winds move the sand and the waves. The developments in Japan offer another example …’. Eventually, fearing that the marquise might still find his 174 chapters and 800 pages of ‘examples’ boring, he delivered his analysis in a single sentence: ‘Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of men: climate, government and religion.’ Taken together, Voltaire proclaimed, they offer ‘the only way to explain the enigma of th
is world’. Two decades later, Voltaire re-read his Essay and added a number of Remarks, including a fourth ‘thing’ that, he now believed, could ‘reconcile what was irreconcilable and explain what is inexplicable’ in human history: changes in population size.2
Voltaire's global vision has attracted few imitators. Although many subsequent historians have provided accounts filled with facts on ‘government and religion’ in the seventeenth century, until very recently few noted population trends and virtually none considered the influence of the climate. Nevertheless, recent work by demographers and climatologists suggests that around 1618, when the human population of the northern hemisphere was larger than ever before, the average global temperature started to fall, producing extreme climate events, disastrous harvest failures and frequent disease epidemics. Human demographic systems can seldom adapt swiftly enough to such adverse events, yet instead of seeking ways to mitigate the natural disasters and save lives, most governments around the globe exacerbated the situation by continuing their existing policies, above all their wars. These various natural and human factors constituted a ‘placenta’ capable of nourishing a global catastrophe. Even though they did not constitute the catastrophe itself, an examination of the placenta explains why the catastrophe lasted for two generations, why it killed up to one-third of the human population, and why it transformed the world inhabited by the survivors.3
1
The Little Ice Age1
‘A strange and wondrous succession of changes in the weather’