Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

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  Records from other states reveal a similar crescendo of revolts in the mid-seventeenth century. In Russia, a wave of urban rebellions in 1648–9 shook the central government to its foundations; while at least 40 rural uprisings took place in Japan between 1590 and 1642 – a total unmatched for two centuries. In China, finally, the number of major armed uprisings rose from under 10 in the 1610s to over 70 in the 1620s and over 80 in the 1630s, affecting 160 counties. According to contemporary historian Zheng Lian, rebel leaders ‘rose like spines on a hedgehog’ and ‘all of them attracted the masses to make themselves strong; they constructed forts and fought for territory. Whole prefectures and counties followed them and served as their ears and eyes, and local officials did not dare to cross them.’3 In all, over a million people took part in this wave of revolts against the late Ming (Fig. 48).

  Popular revolts also seemed a constant menace elsewhere. In India, Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27) complained that ‘notwithstanding the frequent and sanguinary executions which have been dealt among the people of Hindustan, the number of the turbulent and disaffected never seems to diminish… Ever and anon, in one quarter or another, will some accursed miscreant spring up to unfurl the standard of rebellion; so that in Hindustan never has there existed a period of complete repose.’ A generation later, in central Italy, two officials complained that ‘when the people (plebbe) rise up in unison they are a beast without restraint and without reason. Governed only by their present needs’, they become ‘so rash and insolent that they neither obey nor fear those who govern them’.4

  48. Collective violence in Ming China, 1368–1644.

  James Tong found 630 cases of collective violence (rebellion and banditry) recorded in the surviving Gazetteers of Ming China. Of these, four-fifths occurred in the second half of the dynastic era, affecting almost all of the 1,000 counties included in his survey and reaching a crescendo between 1620 and 1644.

  Nevertheless, official documents and memoirs record only a fraction of the occasions when the ‘standard of rebellion’ was unfurled: most revolts have left scarcely a trace in the surviving archives. Thus, in Spain, a major disorder occurred in Zaragoza in 1643 when a contingent of foreign soldiers, quartered in the area for its defence, began to rob those who brought food to market, provoking a group of students to drive them off with stones. When the troops opened fire, a general uprising broke out. Perhaps 140 soldiers died before a thunderstorm sent everyone scurrying for shelter – yet only two surviving manuscripts record these events.5 Likewise, only one document mentions an uprising at San Lúcar de Barrameda in 1641, ‘caused by the presence of soldiers, which has caused many deaths’, or a riot the following year by the students at the university of Santiago de Compostela against attempts to draft them into military service. Virtually no documents recorded the sort of violent protest on which Pedro Calderón de la Barca based his most famous play, The Mayor of Zalamea, first published in 1651: the riot caused by the rape of a village girl by a soldier on his way to the front – yet, since Habsburg Spain was almost constantly at war, such tragic incidents must have abounded.6

  Those who defied the authorities with words rather than deeds left even fewer archival traces. According to the English social historian John Walter, ‘grumbling was the easiest and probably the first weapon of the weak’ in the seventeenth century, and it took place mainly in ‘unregulated spaces’ such as alehouses or coffee houses. He speculated that ‘dearth years doubtless saw increased grumbling’ – and so must years of armed conflict, religious innovation and political tension.7 In England, the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640, and the ensuing conflict between king and Parliament, led to verbal protests of unprecedented frequency and vehemence. In Kent, a young man publicly called a member of a distinguished local family a ‘rogue and rascal and bidding him kiss his arse, with other saucy and unseemly terms’; in Essex, a group of poachers ‘laughed at the warrant’ issued by the greatest nobleman in the region summoning them to court, asserting that ‘there was no law settled at this time’; while in Sussex, a churchwarden asked rhetorically ‘What care we for His Majesty's laws and statutes?’ Some grumblers accompanied their opprobrious words with insulting gestures. In 1640, as the dignitaries of the city of Norwich attended Sunday service in the cathedral, a Bible fell from the upper gallery and hit the mayor on the head, breaking his glasses; ‘at another time, one from the said gallery did spit upon Alderman Barrett's head’; and on a third occasion ‘somebody most beastly did conspurcate [defile] and shit upon’ one of the magistrates below.8

  Yet even if historians could compile a comprehensive list of all recorded ‘contentious events’, scatological and opprobrious words, insulting gestures and grumbles – it would still fall far short of a complete inventory of popular resistance during the seventeenth century. On the one hand, magistrates or other members of the elite strove to avert protests before they got out of hand and so entered the ‘public transcript’. In Europe, pressure from those with influence in the locality forced parties to end their disputes with a public gesture, such as a handshake or (in southern Europe) a kiss, as a sign of reconciliation, and a promise to pay a fine should either party break the peace in future. A similar process occurred in China. Thus, near Shanghai,

  Whenever there was a dispute, Mr. Wang [a wealthy merchant] could always resolve it immediately, even if it was quite serious …. [For example] when Mr. Chu set up dikes, a dispute occurred which involved thousands of people. The official tried to straighten out the merits of the case, but still it could not be resolved. Therefore the official asked Mr. Wang to take a hand in the matter. He successfully managed the dispute merely by sending out a long letter.9

  On the other hand, many protesters took great care to ensure that their resistance left no trace in the public record. ‘To the historian,’ wrote Marc Bloch in 1931, ‘agrarian revolt seems as inseparable from the seigneurial regime as, for example, strikes are inseparable from large-scale capitalism.’ Nevertheless, he continued, ‘The great insurrections were too disorganized to achieve any lasting result and almost always ended in failure and sometimes massacre. The patient, silent struggles stubbornly carried on by rural communities accomplished far more.’ Half a century later, anthropologist James C. Scott reprised and developed Bloch's thesis by suggesting that the poor normally adopted a ‘risk-averse’ strategy when dealing with their neighbours, with the elite, and with the state, waging ‘defensive campaigns of attrition’ that included ‘foot-dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage’. These everyday acts of disobedience, Scott noted, ‘require little or no co-ordination or planning; they make use of implicit understandings and informal networks’. They therefore did not ‘make headlines’ but instead left what he termed a ‘hidden transcript’ preserved, if at all, in narrative accounts and oral traditions.10

  Even when material conditions were at their worst, and mass revolts occurred with unparalleled frequency, the ‘patient, silent struggles’ and ‘defensive campaigns of attrition’ far outnumbered them, because the risk-averse strategies discerned by Bloch and Scott reflected the central concern of the poor in all periods: survival. To make sure they had enough food to survive, the poor applied a simple calculation: How much do I have left? Only when the calculation dictated a shift from clandestine to open resistance and even revolt, did collective protest move from the hidden to the public transcript; and such shifts occurred with particular frequency during the seventeenth century.

  Articulating Grievances

  Three scenarios provoked serious popular revolts with the greatest frequency: a failed harvest; the arrival of troops requiring food and lodging; and the imposition of either a new tax or increases in an existing tax. Each scenario had its own tempo. Normally, because of the prevailing peccatogenic outlook (see chapter 1 above), most disasters in the early modern world initially led those afflicted to seek someone to blame. Often this process began with intr
ospection: a community tried to expiate its own collective sins through acts of penitence such as processions, rogations, pilgrimages and self-flagellation. If this did not work, attention shifted to local individuals or groups whose conduct might have offended God. Some blamed their neighbours, denouncing them as witches, Jews and so on, and tried to eliminate them through the legalized violence of the courts. Others suspected their superiors of selfishly creating an artificial shortage, and took the law into their own hands. Irate crowds might threaten the grain merchants and bakers who failed to provide sufficient food at an affordable price, or the carters and bargees who transported grain, and force them to distribute their precious stock either free or at an artificially low price.11

  If these strategies still failed to feed all the hungry, the crowds blamed the local authorities. Sometimes they demanded that the magistrates mandate lower prices in the market, purchase supplies elsewhere, or conduct an inventory of all grain reserves; at other times they attacked the town granary, the mansions of anyone suspected of hoarding grain, and the abbeys and church barns that stored the yield of the tithes. Finally, communities could try to prevent outsiders from exporting food from the area, whether merchants hoping to maximize profits or agents buying up grain on behalf of a city or an army – although this often escalated the level of collective violence. Normally, intimidating the local people who handled grain required only threats and the confiscation of their goods, whilst influencing local authorities might also involve throwing stones and tearing down walls; but preventing the export of grain often meant hamstringing draft animals, and sometimes also beating or even killing the perceived perpetrators.12

  Billeting was the second major precipitant of popular revolt. Throughout Europe, soldiers quartered in a community demanded free light and heat, clean bed linen and three meals a day from their hosts. In Spain, according to a contemporary source, ‘The soldier consumes in just one week what the farmer expected would feed himself and all his children for a month’; while in France, Cardinal Mazarin reminded his agents ‘that three days’ billeting, with the accustomed licentiousness of the soldiers, is harder for a man to bear than a whole year's taille and other taxes’. Such equations help to explain how the pressure of billeting troops played such a large role in generating popular revolts in Catalonia in 1640 and in Ulster the following year.13

  Although three days of billeting may have done far more harm than the government's fiscal demands for a year, as Mazarin claimed, taxes also produced an abundance of revolts – especially in wartime. In seventeenth-century Aquitaine, for example, more than half of all known uprisings against tax collectors took place in the war years between 1635 and 1659. Tax revolts arose not only from the amount demanded by the state but also from the way in which it distributed the burden. Normally, states apportioned direct taxes among entire communities, not among the individuals who lived in them, and so a fall in the number of taxpayers in a given community inevitably increased the burden on those who remained. Thus, in 1647, the small Sicilian town of Caltabellotta complained that ‘according to the past enumeration of inhabitants, it appears that this town and its lands contained about 8,000 souls’, but ‘at present there are scarcely 3,500 impoverished and miserable souls. So this town … finds itself burdened with large arrears of dues and royal taxes, and the situation gets worse every day’. In Lombardy, another Italian farmer sighed that ‘what land I own I would gladly give away if I only could find someone willing to pay’ the back taxes he owed. It was the same in France, where a government inspector reported that ‘The parishes that have paid least, and which are most in arrears with their land tax, are as poor (or more so) as those that have paid most’.14

  The difficulty (and unpopularity) of increasing existing taxes explains why many early modern governments resorted to two alternative fiscal strategies in wartime: taxing items previously exempt, and taxing categories of subjects previously exempt. The decisions to impose a salt monopoly in Vizcaya in 1631 and in Normandy in 1639, a new tax on property in Portugal in 1637 and in Paris in 1648, and a new excise duty on fruit in Naples in 1647, all triggered major revolts. In Japan, the arrival of inspectors in a village to conduct a land survey – measuring individual holdings of irrigated and dry land and sampling the harvest for quality – was the commonest single cause of rural rebellion, because everyone knew that surveys normally heralded a tax rise. Likewise, in the Ottoman empire, Osman II's decision to end the privileged tax status of the clerical elite, and his threat to do the same to his palace guards, triggered his deposition and murder in 1622; while the demands made by his brother Ibrahim on the clergy of Istanbul led them to support a second regicide in 1648. In both Portugal and Castile, the attempt to make the clergy pay stamp duty provoked determined resistance. In France, the central government's constant erosion of tax exemptions enjoyed by the aristocracy and the civil service eventually turned both social groups into rebels. Finally, the resort of Charles I and his ministers to ‘regalian rights’ (such as the ‘Revocation’ in Scotland, ‘Thorough’ in Ireland, and ‘Ship Money’ in England – all of them measures introduced by royal prerogative) imposed heavy burdens on social groups previously exempt. Thus in the county of Essex, where scarcely 3,000 households normally paid the taxes voted by Parliament, over 14,000 households faced Ship Money assessments – indeed, the king's commissioners wrote ‘£0-0s-0d’ beside a few names, showing that they had visited and assessed even the poorest residents in the realm. Small wonder that so many of Charles's subjects protested.

  Provoking opposition was doubly dangerous for governments in times of hardship, because people who took up arms for one protest might well later use them for another. In 1699 a Qing magistrate eloquently described this process of ‘mission creep’: ‘Incidents that begin as expedients to get food for empty stomachs often end up as organized rebellion’, because a threat to one or more of life's necessities – not just food but also jobs, welfare and traditional rights – could provoke an entire community first to unite and then to rebel. A generation earlier, an agent of the French government made exactly the same point at slightly greater length:

  If one allows the export of grain [from an area where it is already scarce], all the people will run to attack the [grain] merchants. Once they are exhilarated by having got something for nothing, they will undoubtedly form bands and, from there, will close the roads to all who want to transport the king's money, putting at risk the receipt of the tax revenues of His Majesty; for the people, once armed and in rebellion, will use its weapons against everyone who asks them for money.

  An example of this process occurred at the village of Abjat in Périgord in 1640. The Croquant revolt had only just been suppressed (see chapter 10) and now, in a year of dearth, a cavalry company marching to join the royal army on the Spanish frontier arrived and demanded free quarters. The inhabitants refused them entry, shouting: ‘We must kill all these thieves and not allow them lodgings.’ When the troopers tried to find quarters in neighbouring hamlets instead, a gang of several hundred peasants ambushed them and killed their captain, whose body they then mutilated and dragged around the town. Afterwards, the royal courts indicted not only 109 named individuals – including the local priest, 12 village office-holders, 4 royal officials, 4 merchants and 14 craftsmen, but also ‘all other inhabitants and householders of the town and parish of Abjat’ – because almost everyone became involved, including local gentlemen who sheltered the peasants’ cattle, and the nearest town, which sheltered the ringleaders. Thanks to this united front, the inhabitants who manned the barricades around Abjat successfully defied the government for five years.15

  Deterrents to Collective Violence

  Given the existence of so many grievances, and their correlation with adversity, it is surprising that revolts did not occur even more often; and in his study of peasant societies, James Scott gave detailed consideration to this paradox. He discerned four factors that normally deter villagers, however desperate, from open resi
stance. First, the need to earn a daily wage formed a powerful restraint on rebellion: a family that did not work – whether because on strike, in rebellion, or unemployed – might not eat. Second, the vertical links of kinship, friendship, faction, patronage and ritual in each community created ties between the dominant and the dominated that discouraged violent action. Third, and paradoxically, any economic development within the community that increased social divisions also militated against collective action. Thus a shift towards producing crops (especially industrial crops) for export normally created groups of prosperous cultivators who, as long as strong demand for their goods lasted, remained largely insulated from the frustrations and sufferings of those still tied to subsistence farming; and this significantly reduced the likelihood of unified resistance. Fourth and finally, in most farming communities of the early modern world, the poor often depended for their survival on deference and subordination. Better-off neighbours were more likely to provide relief in time of need to those who showed constant respect and obedience, whereas neglect or surliness might lead to denial of charity and even expulsion from the community. However much the poor may have resented their subordination and humiliation, their circumstances compelled them to conform: they might try to negotiate the terms of subordination, but they rarely dared to challenge it.16

  For all these reasons, despite desperate economic circumstances and apparently intolerable provocations, the poor normally ensured that their protests did not break any laws. They took care not to steal (often ostentatiously burning the property of their targets, and beating anyone seen absconding with goods belonging to their victims) and they rarely carried prohibited weapons. In England, at least, those who destroyed property did so two by two, because the law stated that a ‘riot’ (severely punished) began only when three or more people became involved; while in both England and China, resentful subjects might await the interval between the death of one monarch and the proclamation of the next to seek revenge for a perceived wrong – because even some judges had doubts whether laws remained in force during an interregnum.17