Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Other people migrated on an annual basis to work on the crops, because the cultivation of most staples requires many extra hands at certain predictable, intense, but short periods. In the case of rice, farmers needed to transplant seedlings and add fertilizer as rapidly as possible, and so throughout East and Southeast Asia itinerant labourers followed the rhythm of these activities. In cereal-producing areas, harvesting had to be accomplished rapidly and so required additional hands for a very brief period. In Catalonia, for example, every June ‘by ancient custom, many reapers [the segadors] came down from all the mountainous regions and converged on Barcelona’ to hire themselves out to farmers with land in the fertile plains of the principality.71

  Itinerant labourers who lacked ‘a house, a job or a fixed address’ were extremely vulnerable to economic adversity – far more vulnerable than those who remained in their community, and so could claim at least some ‘entitlements’. They were also far more dangerous. One eyewitness characterized the segadors as ‘dissolute and bold men who for the rest of the year lived disordered lives’ and ‘normally caused disturbances and unrest wherever they went; but the absolute need for their services apparently made it impossible to stop them.’ In June 1640, after a prolonged drought had caused great scarcity in the principality, some 2,500 restless reapers arrived in Barcelona and almost immediately ‘caused disturbances and unrest’ that led first to the murder of three royal judges and the viceroy, and eventually to the declaration of the ‘Republic of Catalonia’.72

  Except for those who became domestic servants, few migrants were female. In the seventeenth century only a handful of European women crossed the oceans alone, and even they sometimes disguised themselves as men (like the remarkable Basque transvestite ‘lieutenant nun’ Catalina de Erauso, who dictated memoirs describing her feats as a soldier of Philip IV in America). Rather more accompanied their husbands or parents as they sailed to overseas colonies – but males always outnumbered females.73 Neither masquerading nor migration was an option for many Han Chinese women because from about the age of seven their mothers tightly bound their feet, just like their own. This produced, in its extreme form, ‘the golden lotus’: a foot measuring only three inches from the heel to the end of the large toe. A poem by Hu Shilan, a woman from a gentry family later forced to earn her living by teaching the daughters of more fortunate families, bitterly recalled the days when

  My little maid stood by me under canopy of flowers

  So that my tiny shoes wouldn't slip on mosses so green.

  Little did I know that in mid-life I would have to roam around

  Braving the scorched sun and furious storms.

  In a crisis, a woman with bound feet would find it hard to ‘roam around’ – or, more important, to run away: a potentially fatal disadvantage during the Ming-Qing transition when China teemed with soldiers and bandits.74

  Involuntary Migration

  Besides those migrants who were ‘pulled’ from their homes through the prospect (whether apparent or real) of economic advancement elsewhere, the mid-seventeenth-century crisis ‘pushed’ hosts of others onto the roads through the threat of death or destitution if they remained. In Anatolia, the heart of the Ottoman empire, what contemporaries called the ‘Great Flight’ caused the tax-paying population of some communities to decline by three-quarters between the 1570s and the 1640s as landless unmarried men departed to find sustenance by serving in bandit armies, by seeking work in cities, or by studying in religious schools (medreses: see chapter 7 below). In central Europe, the Thirty Years War depopulated many communities. Martin Opitz, the most famous German poet of his day, asked rhetorically in his 1621 verse epic, ‘Consolation in the Adversity of War’:

  Is there nowhere that war cannot come

  So that we can live there without fear or flight? …

  The trees stand no more;

  The gardens are desolate.

  The sickle and the plough are now a sharp blade.

  In India, the famine and floods in Gujarat in 1628–31 likewise caused widespread flight, especially by craftsmen. According to an English observer, ‘the greater part of [the] weavers, washers and dyers who (such as are escaped the direfull stroake of famine) are disperst into forraigne parts of greater plentie, leaving few or none of their faculty [skills]’.75 In China, Chen Zilong, a scholar-official of the Ming as well as one of the finest poets of his generation, captured the agonizing fate of such refugees from disaster in ‘The Little Cart’:

  The little cart jolting and banging through the yellow haze of dusk;

  The man pushing behind: the woman pulling in front.

  They have left the city and do not know where to go.

  ‘Green, green, those elm-tree leaves: they will cure my hunger,

  If only we could find some quiet place and sup upon them together.’

  The wind has flattened the yellow mother-wort;

  Above it, in the distance, they see the walls of a house.

  ‘There, surely, must be people living who'll give you something to eat.’

  They tap at the door, but no one comes; they look in, but the kitchen is empty.

  They stand hesitating in the lonely road and their tears fall like rain.76

  Those arbitrarily deprived of their freedom before being deported faced an even worse fate. Some were conscripted soldiers and sailors. Although, in Europe, only Sweden introduced a permanent ‘draft’, most states periodically resorted to ‘impressment’: the compulsory enlistment in armies and navies of men with no obvious means of support, of men who had beaten or abandoned their wives, and of men who had embarked on what the community considered a life of sin – adulterers and fornicators. In addition, since in wartime ‘sin’ seldom filled the ranks, governments periodically conscripted law-abiding citizens. In Castile, communities often met their quota for the draft through a lottery held among all eligible males, and the criteria for ‘eligibility’ widened notably as the seventeenth century advanced and the population declined. Thus in the university town of Salamanca, in 1630 all men over age 40 were exempt, but this limit had risen to age 70 by 1640. At the same time, traditional exemptions (for students and professors, for town officials and familiars of the Inquisition, for gentlemen and doctors, even for the disabled) were challenged, until the only categories recognized as exempt were clerics and gypsies (the latter regularly rounded up for compulsory galley service). The draft could soon depopulate entire communities. Thus in 1642 the Spanish town of Villarrobledo, with some 3,000 inhabitants, complained that impressment had removed some 400 men over the previous five years and asked for relief since it now lacked sufficient manpower to work the fields. (The government responded with a demand for 60 more men.) Sometimes recruits became so scarce that they were held in gaol between enlistment and deployment to prevent escape. Thus a group of recruits from Castile who had languished in gaol for eight months, awaiting transport to fight in Italy, pleaded with the Council of War in Madrid ‘for the love of God arrange for us to get out of this prison so that we may serve His Majesty, even if it should be in Hell itself’.77

  Some states also deported large numbers of miscreants rather than executing them. A number were captured in war and rebellion. The Mughals, for example, regularly sold their prisoners in the slave markets of central Asia. Thus in the 1630s the governor of Kalpi, in the foothills of the Himalayas, boasted that in repressing a rebellion he had ‘beheaded the leaders and enslaved their women, daughters and children, who were more than two lachs [200,000] in number’, and sent them for sale. While recognizing that chronicles tend to exaggerate numbers, historian Scott Levi (who quoted this detail) estimated that ‘over the years, Mughal military expansion in India accounts for the enslavement and exportation of hundreds of thousands of individuals’. Other deportees were convicts. The Russian government deported many criminals to defend the southern frontier against Tatar raids, rather than putting them to death – including some convicted witches who received a sentence of permanen
t exile and, ironically, spent the rest of their lives patrolling the frontiers of Orthodoxy (in most parts of western Europe they would have been publicly executed). In Scotland, exasperated by the constant lawlessness of one particular clan, in 1626 the government deported all men named ‘Macgregor’ to continental Europe, ‘sufficiently guarded by some of their officers who will be answerable for their not escaping’. Before leaving for the continent, every Macgregor had to swear ‘that they shall never return again within this kingdom under the pain of death’.78

  Most British deportees were transported to America. England's Virginia Company showed the way, rounding up in 1618 ‘a hundred young boys and girls that lay starving in the streets’ and sending them to Virginia. A few years later, the Company similarly removed the ‘super-increasing people from the city [of London] to Virginia’ so that it ‘may ease the city of many that are ready to starve, and do starve daily in our streets … for want of food to put into their mouths’.79 By the 1640s the Company employed ‘spirits’ who ‘did entice children and people away for Virginia’ aboard their waiting ships with the promise of food once they got on board, but, according to Charles Baily (one of the thousands of victims), ‘being once on board, [I] could never get on shoar untill I came to America, where I was sold as a bond-slave for seaven years’. Baily later believed that he and the other ‘poor creatures had better have been hanged, than to suffer the death and misery they did’. Some of these ‘poor creatures’ were defeated soldiers and rebels whom the victorious Republican regime in London condemned to work as unfree labour in Barbados and other American colonies. According to a recent study, ‘tens of thousands of people from Britain and Ireland ended up working as bond slaves in the Chesapeake and Caribbean during the revolutionary period’.80

  Some European governments deported not only convicts to work in their colonies in America and Asia during the seventeenth century, but also orphaned girls and prostitutes, hoping to redress the extreme gender imbalance that prevailed in most overseas colonies. It did not always work: a stunning 80 per cent of the married women in seventeenth-century Canada who died childless had come as ‘Filles du Roy’ (‘daughters of the king’, as the deportees were known).81 Many male migrants also failed to reproduce. Some perished en route from the rigours of the journey, and others died soon after they reached their destination because they lacked immunity to the pathogens they encountered there. Thus between 1604 and 1634 some 25,000 European males died in the Royal Hospital in Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, most of them shortly after disembarking from their long sea voyage from Lisbon; and of over 5,000 Portuguese men who left Lisbon for India between 1629 and 1634, fewer than half arrived alive. Equally, despite the immigration of some 223,000 Europeans to England's Caribbean islands in the course of the seventeenth century, their total ‘white’ population in 1700 was scarcely 40,000.

  The greatest forced migration of the seventeenth century also involved the greatest mortality: the deportation of Africans. Some, especially in east Africa, were captured and taken to Muslim states in the north. Throughout the seventeenth century slave caravans brought 5,000–6,000 African men and women to Ottoman Egypt each year, whence they were distributed throughout the empire – but, after the arrival of the Europeans in the west, far more Africans went involuntarily to the Americas.82

  Estimating the overall size of the trade in slaves between Africa and the various European colonies in America is extremely difficult; nevertheless, around 1640 an official with extensive experience estimated that the slave population of Spanish America stood at about 325,000 and that just over 9,000 new slaves were required each year to maintain this level. In addition, a further 80,000 slaves probably laboured in Brazil, where the colony needed to import over 2,000 slaves annually just to replace ‘losses'; while in 1656 alone 2,000 African slaves arrived in the English colony of Barbados. Taken together, these figures suggest that a total of at least 13,000 African slaves arrived each year in America in the mid-seventeenth century.83 In addition, thousands more captured Africans died either en route to the Atlantic coast, or in the holding pens where they awaited shipment, or on the voyage. Adding these totals together, Europeans enslaved some two million Africans during the seventeenth century, half of them from west-central Africa and most of the rest from the states along the Gold Coast and the Bights of Benin and Biafra.

  Negative Compound Interest

  The various processes that reduced the human population in the mid-seventeenth century, and thus reduced short-term demand for resources (especially food), had five important long-term consequences that created a ‘negative compound interest’:

  • Depleting the next generation of mothers. Pressure on widows to kill themselves decimates the current generation of mothers, already reduced by high mortality during and after childbirth (and, in Catholic countries, also by an increase in the number of nuns); but killing or abandoning girls at birth decimates the mothers of the next generation. A female infanticide rate of 10 per cent will reduce population growth in the next generation by 30 per cent. A Chinese poem bitterly noted this double assault on women:

  Fujian custom leaves alive after birth only half the number of baby girls born;

  Lucky survivors desire to be virtuous females.

  Daughters should die after their husband's death;

  Poisoned wine is ready in cups and cords await on beams.

  A daughter clinging to life withstands great pressure,

  Broken hearts are full of grievances;

  Death occurs at last amid clansmen's cheers,

  Official distinction is bestowed to glorify the clan's name for a thousand years.84

  • Creating depleted cohorts. Any short-term crisis that significantly reduces the size of an age cohort, whether through human or natural catastrophe, automatically reduces the ability of that cohort to reproduce itself. A rise of 50 per cent in the prevailing death rate means that those under 15 at the time of the crisis will lack the numbers to restore the previous population level. Moreover, by a tragic coincidence (and it seems to be no more than a coincidence, at least in Europe) each generation reduced by a major mortality crisis in the seventeenth century reached marriageable age just as another catastrophe struck. Thus the ‘cohort’ depleted by the plague of 1630–1 came of age just in time to face the famine of 1661–3, while their children reached the age of reproduction during the crisis of the 1690s. Similarly, the ‘cohort’ depleted by the crises of 1618–21 and 1647–53 came of age just in time to face the harvest failures of the mid-1670s, while their children reached the age of reproduction during the ‘Great Winter’ of 1708–9 and the resulting famine.85 Each catastrophe thus reduced not only the size of the afflicted generation but also the size of the next one.

  • Death on the road. In every age, it is hard to raise a family on the move. Parish registers all over Europe record the frequent death of ‘strangers’ – men, women and children who perished as they tried to get from one place to another, usually in search of work or food. Because each parish kept separate records, their entries rarely allow historians to recreate the losses of migrant families, but some qualitative sources come to the rescue. To take a single example, Peter Hagendorf, a soldier in the Thirty Years War between 1624 and 1648, kept a diary as he marched almost 15,000 miles around Europe with his regiment. He recorded meticulously the births, marriages and deaths of his family, later placing numbers beside the death of all four children by his first wife between 1627 and 1633, when she died, and of four more by his second wife between 1635 and 1648. Most of his eight children died as infants (one before baptism, and two more in their first week). In the course of the Thirty Years War Hagendorf thus sired ten legitimate children, but only two were still alive when it ended, one aged five and the other just an infant.86 If Hagendorf's experience was representative, then active military service was a sentence of death not only for many soldiers, but also for their families; and since at least a million men fought in the European wars of the mi
d-seventeenth century, the overall demographic consequences were severe.

  • The hidden costs of migration. Some of the villages of northern Portugal that supplied large numbers of men – both sailors and colonists – for the country's overseas enterprise boasted fewer than 60 men for every 100 women, and scarcely half the women in the community ever married. Similar gender imbalances characterized other villages where most of the men migrated to find work, producing two long-term demographic consequences. First, in cereal-producing areas with soils too heavy for women to till by themselves, the departure of too many men (whether to fight, as in Scandinavia, or to colonize, as in Iberia) could reduce food production so much that, although consumption fell (because the men no longer ate local food), the community might no longer be able to feed itself and so eventually atrophied. Second, at least in monogamous societies, male migration on this scale dramatically reduced the number of marriages and therefore the size of the next generation, once again creating a kind of ‘negative compound interest’.87

  • ‘A young man's world’. The sociologist Jack Goldstone drew attention to ‘the extraordinary youthfulness of England's population in the 1630s’, both absolutely and relatively.

  Age as a percentage of England's total population

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  Year Total Population 0–4 5–14 15–24 25–29 Total aged 15–29 Total aged 30+

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  1631 4,892,580 12.5 19.9 18.2 7.9 26.1 41.6

  1641 5,091,725 11.8 20.5 17.3 8 25.3 42.4

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