Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  As Sheilagh Ogilvie has observed, the efforts of Europe's rulers to fund their wars in the first half of the seventeenth century ‘affected more than taxation and warfare. The administrative instruments developed for these purposes could also regulate activities previously inaccessible to government’; and in his study, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, James C. Scott examined the process by which modern governments impose order (something he called ‘legibility’) upon those activities that they want to regulate. He suggested that the process came at a cost, because ‘certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision’:

  The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control and manipulation.38

  Scott traced both the growth of ‘legibility’ and the ‘narrowing of vision’ back to the mid-seventeenth century.

  This chronology is not surprising. The trauma of the Global Crisis naturally made states want to ‘know, control, and manipulate’ both nature and society more effectively, in case they faced any repetition. Japan led the way: the cadastral surveys carried out by the Tokugawa shoguns (see chapter 16 above), which made both agriculture and demography ‘legible’, proved crucial in enabling them to mitigate the effects of the Little Ice Age. In China, the Kangxi emperor, mindful of the role played by harvest failure in the fall of the previous dynasty, considered the systematic collection and collation of accurate information about the weather crucial in promoting political stability. Although provincial officials of the Ming had normally included a ‘rain report’ in their regular accounts of local conditions, the central government paid little attention; the Kangxi emperor, by contrast, not only read the official weather reports but also requested reports from his Bannermen and bondservants on droughts, floods and harvest projections (especially for Jiangnan, which provided most of the capital's grain supply).39

  Kangxi's example inspired at least one minister in Europe. Sébastien le Prestre, marquis of Vauban (1633–1707), acknowledged that his ambitious plan to replace the complex tax structure of Louis XIV's France with a poll tax was ‘more or less what they do in China’, citing the printed descriptions of the eyewitnesses Martino Martini (of which he owned a copy) and Louis Le Comte (Vauban attended the meeting of the Académie des Sciences at which Le Comte's observations were discussed).40 In fact, the search for ‘legibility’ in France had already begun. In 1656 Jean-Baptiste Colbert informed Cardinal Mazarin (whom he served) that some Paris judges were ‘searching in their registers for examples and arguments’ that might help them to oppose the fiscal demands of his master, and suggested that ‘perhaps it would not displease Your Eminence if I carried out a search of everything that has been said and done in this matter’ to prepare an effective refutation. Mazarin welcomed the idea, adding ‘It seems odd that no one has taken the trouble to keep such a register.’ Colbert lost no time in filling this gap, systematically accumulating data about France's taxes, population size, land titles and economic output; and after Mazarin died in 1661, Colbert did the same for the king. Above all, each year he prepared a summary of the detailed accounts of public income and expenditure that he had laboriously prepared, and presented it to the king, specially written in a small book by a noted calligrapher and handsomely bound in red leather, so that Louis could carry it around with him at all times.41

  Vauban bombarded the king with more ambitious statistics, but unlike Colbert, who almost always stayed at court and acquired most of his information indirectly, Vauban moved around almost ceaselessly to see things for himself, and he often presented his findings to Louis XIV in visual form. Thus after overseeing in person the construction or reconstruction of France's frontier fortresses, Vauban created a scale model of each one so that the king could visualize the defences of his kingdom without leaving his palace – an early form of ‘Google Earth’. By 1700 almost 150 models existed, mostly on the same large scale of 1/600, with miniature walls, churches, houses and trees recreated in wood, silk, paper and sand. During a siege, the daily updates received from his field commanders could be reproduced on the model, allowing the king to micromanage operations via a stream of detailed instructions. It would be hard to find a better example of both the advantages and the perils of ‘seeing like a state’.

  Vauban also bombarded his master with other data acquired through a combination of personal observation, on-the-ground surveys and extensive reading; and where Colbert had concentrated on economics, Vauban focused on population. In the words of a document composed in 1686 (capitalized for emphasis), ‘ONE MEASURES THE GRANDEUR OF KINGS BY THE NUMBER OF THEIR SUBJECTS’, he called for an annual census to be undertaken. ‘Would it not give the king great satisfaction,’ Vauban asked rhetorically,

  To know at a fixed date every year the exact number of his subjects, in total and in detail, together with all the assets, wealth and poverty of each place? The number of his nobles, clergy, [and] officials … by category, together with the place where they live? Would it not be a pleasure, but a useful and necessary pleasure, if he and his ministers could ascertain in just one hour's time the present and past state of the great kingdom that he rules?

  Anticipating an affirmative answer, Vauban called on Louis to commission a series of ‘general and regional maps’ to which he could link the appropriate totals of population and assets, updated each year, so he would know ‘precisely and easily the gains and losses, the growth or decline of his kingdom’ and, if necessary, ‘take appropriate measures’.42 Vauban's archive abounds with meticulous censuses of communities, each one arranged according to parish and street, showing the gender, age and occupation of each resident, linked to a detailed map.

  Vauban also undertook speculative exercises which he called ‘supputations’, based on his reading, his travels and the reports of others, on such topics as how to improve the yield of crops (to feed the king's armies better), how to make trees grow taller and straighter (to provide better masts for the king's warships), and even on how to get peasants to breed hogs so that in ten generations they would number over three million (to reduce the dependence of both peasants and soldiers on bread).43 He also devoted much attention to France's overseas colonies, and especially to Canada, presenting the king with a memorandum in 1699 that suggested that the dispatch of more settlers every year would have a dramatic impact, because ‘instead of the 13 to 14,000 souls that currently live in Canada, thirty years from now – that is, in about 1730 – there could be 100,000’. Moreover, if these men and women married and had four children each, Vauban predicted that the colony's population would double every generation so that ‘around the year 2000 there might be 51 million people’.44

  Such ‘supputations’ were of course totally unrealistic – the product of that ‘narrowing of vision’ identified by James Scott. The idea that peasant farmers would leave their hogs alive to breed while they themselves starved betrays remarkable ignorance of French rural life; while Vauban's addiction to geometry and calculations, although understandable given his background as a military engineer, led him to overlook other critical factors. Above all, although he cited ‘the mortality of the year 1693 and the scarcity of food’ as one reason for the decline in the number of Louis XIV's subjects, he ‘considered climatic conditions as secondary’, far less important than war and taxation. He even assured the king that ‘dearth exists in the mind, not in reality’.45

  The statistical approach of Colbert and Vauban nevertheless found many admirers abroad. In a provocative article on the spread of ‘political arithmetic’ in seventeenth-century Europe, Jacob Soll has observed that �
��European states shared not only complex economic, military, political, social and spiritual crises but also comparable responses to them’ – and examples are not hard to find, from the ‘Cameralism’ of many German states, to later Stuart England, where Sir John Plumb underlined the envy of many of Charles II's ministers for what they perceived as the ‘systematic efficiency’ of their French counterparts. Many royal officials became Fellows of the Royal Society, because they ‘believed that the practical problems of life were best approached through knowledge’; and although their tunnel-vision often led them (like Vauban) ‘into absurdities’, by 1700 ‘Britain probably enjoyed the most efficient government machine in Europe’. There was more to political arithmetic in the seventeenth century than counting the reproductive potential of hogs.46

  The Containment of Disease

  James Scott drew attention to another consequence of ‘seeing like a state’. Starting in the 1650s, he observed, European statesmen seemed

  Devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format. The social simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state capacity. They made possible quite discriminating interventions of every kind, such as public-health measures, political surveillance, and relief of the poor.47

  The ‘discriminating interventions’ in the field of public health were perhaps the most striking, since they included the containment of both of the two most lethal infections of the age: plague and smallpox.

  We now know that bubonic plague is a bacillus spread by infected fleas that move first from rats (their normal ‘hosts’) to humans, and then among humans; but no one at the time (or, indeed, until the 1890s) knew this. Therefore, marginal groups often became a scapegoat for epidemics. When plague swept Milan in 1630, the city magistrates tried and executed several strangers whom, they claimed, had spread infection with ‘pestiferous powders’. This judgment unleashed a ‘great fear’ far and wide: in Madrid, 1,000 miles away, rumours spread ‘that some men had arrived sent by the devil to spread diabolical powders to kill people, as in Milan’, and the city magistrates gave orders to stop ‘any stranger who aroused suspicion’ and to detain for three weeks anyone coming from a place suspected of plague infection. They even forbade monasteries to receive visiting clerics for fear that fugitives ‘might make use of religious habits and garb’ to pursue their evil plans. The magistrates of Seville, even further from Milan, held religious processions to plead for divine protection against the threat of ‘pestiferous powders’ – but also closed all the city gates.48

  Although the diagnosis was wrong, the treatment was right – to prevent the movement of people and property in times of plague – and in every major city of Italy, a permanent Health Board staffed by both doctors and magistrates enforced draconian controls. In 1630 the Florence Health Board sanitized so many letters and packages that the city's mail revenues fell by 97 per cent – but, thanks to such strictness, although the plague ravaged all Italy north of Florence, killing up to one-quarter of the population, it never moved south of the Tuscan frontier. Such successes impressed governments outside Italy, and they began to follow suit. In France, a treatise of 1628 claimed irreverently that should God himself be ‘suspect of contagion, it would be my duty to keep Him confined’; while in Spain, a cordon sanitaire stopped the plague epidemic of 1631 at the Pyrenees, and another in 1647–51 prevented it from entering Castile.49 The lethality of the disease had not diminished – the epidemic that struck England in 1665 killed 100,000 Londoners, about one-quarter of the total population of the capital, rising to one-third in the poorer parishes, plus 100,000 more elsewhere in the kingdom – and few expected the Great Plague to be the last. Around 1690, the statistician Sir William Petty noted that plague epidemics struck England, on average, once every 20 years, and he predicted that the next visitation, which could not be far off, would kill 120,000 people in London alone. The city's magistrates were equally pessimistic, continuing to print the ‘Bills of Mortality’ with a special column for plague burials until 1703 (Plate 25). They were wrong. In France, although plague killed perhaps two million people in the course of the seventeenth century, each epidemic affected fewer places (Fig. 53). Even more remarkably, one area of Europe after another became entirely plague-free: Sicily after 1625, northern Italy (except for Genoa) after 1631, Scotland after 1649, Catalonia after 1651, England after 1665.50

  Other governments managed to contain smallpox. Paradoxically, just as new and more virulent strains of the disease spread from Africa to the Americas, and perhaps to Europe, many people in Asia acquired immunity. The change began in north China. Smallpox decimated the Manchus after they invaded the Ming empire, killing even the emperor in 1661, and his son and successor the Kangxi emperor, a smallpox survivor, took a keen interest in the disease. He discovered that some Chinese doctors had developed a treatment called ‘variolation’: the deliberate administration of a mild form of the virus that most people survived, thereby gaining life-long immunity because smallpox only strikes each victim once.51 According to his own account, Kangxi began to test the procedure ‘on one or two people’ (read: slaves) in the 1670s, and since it seemed to work, he insisted on inoculating his apprehensive family; then all the Banner troops on whom the safety of the Qing state depended; and finally over half the population of Beijing. ‘This is an extremely important thing, of which I am very proud,’ the emperor wrote in a testament for his children, because variolation ‘has saved the health of millions of men’. His Majesty could have noted that variolation also brought great benefits to women, since contracting smallpox during pregnancy often proved fatal to both mother and child; and so, largely as a result of variolation, child mortality in China fell from 40 per cent to 10 per cent in the course of the eighteenth century.52 From China, the technique spread slowly westwards to both the Ottoman and Mughal empires; and from there favourable reports reached western Europe. Although variolation arrived too late to save Queen Mary II of Great Britain (d. 1694), the heir of Louis XIV (d. 1711), or Emperor Peter II of Russia (d. 1730), deaths from smallpox plummeted wherever variolation was introduced. By any standard, this was a remarkable (and remarkably successful) public-health project.53

  53. The conquest of plague in seventeenth-century Europe.

  A steady reduction occurred in the number of places in France affected by plague during the epidemics of 1628–31, 1636–7 and 1668–9, largely thanks to the effective enforcement of quarantine restrictions.

  More ‘discriminating interventions’ in the field of public health could have occurred in the seventeenth century had the perverse prevailing medical orthodoxy not insisted that physical illnesses arose from general and not specific causes. Physicians therefore strove to balance the four ‘humours’ in each human body (often by blood-letting, sweating, vomiting or enemas), and deprecated any drug that did not produce some sort of excretion. This ruled out the bark of the cinchona tree (Cinchona officinalis), which contained quinine and so provided some protection against malaria. Jesuit missionaries in South America observed the therapeutic properties of ‘Peruvian bark’ and in the 1640s began to send regular shipments to Rome where, after extensive tests, doctors used it to stabilize feverish malaria patients. By the end of the century, over 30 books on the medicinal properties of the wonder drug had appeared in print – but some were hostile. In the mid-1650s some physicians claimed that although the drug produced short-term successes, it exacerbated the condition in the long term, leading many victims of the disease to refuse ‘Jesuits' powder’. One of them was Oliver Cromwell, Britain's Lord Protector, whose death of malarial fever in 1658 doomed Britain's Republican experiment.54

  Eventually, the new treatment prevailed. Robert Tabor carried out trials among malaria suffers in the Cambridge area until 1672, when he published his Rational account of the cause and cure of agues. His remedy cured Charles II, the heir to the
French throne, and the queen of Spain. It also made him rich – according to an envious physician (who claimed that Tabor had plagiarized his knowledge of cinchona bark), although ‘I never gott £10 by it, he hath gott £5,000’ – and a knighthood.55 Such rewards encouraged seventeenth-century medical practitioners, both licensed and amateur, to examine and test new remedies. In doing so they not only developed a sound methodology for experimental pharmacology, but also began to shift medical attention from applying remedies to individual patients according to their perceived ‘humours’, towards finding an efficient remedy for individual diseases.

  Nourishing the People

  After the 1650s, many governments also intervened to prevent their subjects from starvation in times of dearth. The Qing, for example, drew on ‘more than two millennia of theoretical principles and institutional precedents’ when they resuscitated the network of state-run granaries ‘with a consistency, intensity, and degree of centralization unknown in previous eras’.56 Each of China's counties boasted a public grain reserve known as the ‘ever normal granary’ (changpingcang), supplemented by community granaries (shecang) and charity granaries (yicang). Traditionally, each of them bought grain after harvest, when it was cheap, and sold it below the market price during late winter and spring to stabilize prices in good years and to prevent famine when necessary; but since the wars fought by the Late Ming left virtually nothing for welfare, by the 1640s almost all granaries lay in disrepair.

  In 1654 the Shunzhi emperor ordered officials to re-establish both county and community granaries, with sufficient stocks to cope with any future famine relief; but it proved a slow process. In 1680 his son the Kangxi emperor began to issue a stream of legislation for efficient grain storage and, after some bad harvests, he also opened granaries and reduced or cancelled taxes even before reports arrived of actual famine. He accelerated these efforts after the drought-induced famine of 1691–2, with dramatic results: whereas the target reserve for each province under the late Ming was 1,500 tons, by the early eighteenth century at least 12 of China's provinces held a reserve of more than 50,000 tons each, while the state granaries in Yunnan, in the remote southwest, held 200,000 tons, and those of Gansu in the equally remote northwest held 272,000 tons (one million bushels). Above all, according to Louis Le Comte even though more than enough rice from Jiangnan arrived every year via the Grand Canal to feed the imperial household, ‘they are so concerned about running short, that the granaries of Beijing always stock enough rice for three or four years ahead. It remains edible for a long time because they take care to dry and heat it first.’57