Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Wars and revolutions killed, maimed and ruined large numbers of people, both directly through brutality and indirectly through forced migration and destruction of property. Deaths among young men rose with especial rapidity in western and central Europe during the Thirty Years War, in eastern Europe and Russia during the Thirteen Years War, and in China during the Ming-Qing transition. For many soldiers, as well as for thousands of civilians – Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, Jews and Poles in Ukraine, and Ming Clansmen in China – the World Crisis proved a terminal event. Taken together, these tragedies claimed the lives of so many millions, including so many members of the elite, that one might speak of a ‘lost generation’.7

  In some areas, a whole way of life disappeared. The violence of the Ming-Qing transition permanently destroyed sericulture in the province of Shaanxi, and the Gujarat famine and floods of 1628–31 did the same to one of India's premier cotton- and indigo-producing areas (see chapters 5 and 13 above). The plague epidemic that spread through southern Europe in the decade after 1649, killing one half of the inhabitants of Seville, Barcelona, Naples and other similar cities (see Fig. 11), set the seal on the decline of the Mediterranean as the heart of the European economy for ever. In many other areas, if the observations of Alex de Waal and Scott Cane concerning the effect of a prolonged ‘hungry time’ on farmers of marginal lands and on hunter-gatherers (see chapters 1 and 15 above) also prevailed in the seventeenth century, then many communities and countless families must have crossed ‘a threshold of awfulness’ and perished, leaving no trace.

  Admittedly, the turmoil produced winners as well as losers. In East Asia, both Nurhaci and Tokugawa Ieyasu were revered as gods soon after their deaths and bequeathed to their numerous descendants a luxurious lifestyle that would endure for more than two centuries. Indeed, the numerous Tōshōgū shrines in Japan still honour the divinity of the first shogun, making him by far the most successful denizen of the seventeenth-century world. The descendants of Michael Romanov also prospered from the political, economic and social balance created by the crisis of 1648–9, cementing their control over an empire that expanded at the rate of 55 square miles a day – more than 20,000 square miles a year – for almost three centuries.8 Many followers of these rulers also profited from the upheaval. In East Asia, tens of thousands of Manchu Bannermen and their families exchanged a precarious existence on the steppe for a life of plenty in one of the Tartar towns of China. Likewise, most of the military and civilian officials who swiftly transferred their allegiance from Ming to Qing prospered: of 125 senior officials who received the ambiguous title Er chen (‘ministers who served both dynasties’), 49 became the president or vice-president of a department of state after the conquest.9 In Japan, the Tokugawa clansmen and most of their daimyō allies enjoyed more than two centuries of peace and plenty following the proclamation of the ‘Genna armistice’ in 1615. In Russia, the boyars and their descendants who in 1649 won control over their serfs through the Ulozhenie, maintained their advantage for over two centuries. In India, the leaders who supported Aurangzeb when he challenged his father and brothers during the Mughal Civil War of 1657–9 shared some of the wealth of the richest state on earth.

  In Europe, among civilians, government office allowed Samuel Pepys to increase his personal fortune from £25, when he began to serve in 1660, to £10,000 ten years later; while Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who at school ‘was so dull that he was always bottom of the class’, thanks to the favour first of Cardinal Mazarin and then of Louis XIV, died a millionaire and bequeathed a hereditary peerage to his son. Among soldiers, Sweden's commanders in Germany who survived the Thirty Years War returned home with immense wealth: the castle of Skökloster near Stockholm testifies even today to the booty brought home by General Karl Gustav Wrangel, while his colleague Hans Christoff Königsmarck, who began as a common soldier, died a nobleman with assets worth two million thalers. In England luck and good judgement during the Civil War allowed George Monck, the younger son of a squire (and fortunate as a young man to escape hanging for murdering a deputy sheriff), to become duke of Albemarle and commander-in-chief of England's armed forces in 1660, and to die with assets worth £60,000. Monck's followers also prospered. In return for facilitating the Restoration, the general insisted on full payment of the wage arrears of his men, and over the next two years the king's treasurers-at-war paid them £800,000.10

  Often, soldiers gained at the expense of civilians. A Brandenburg lawyer and tax official, Johann Georg Maul, kept a diary between 1631 and 1645 in which he obsessively catalogued the descent of his family from prosperity to virtual destitution at the hands of soldiers who either robbed them, lodged with them, or demanded contributions from them. Maul's first experience of war cost him 280 thalers: a cavalry sergeant, three troopers and their lackey ‘ate their way through’ 55 thalers in food over 11 weeks; ‘there was also 115 thalers … for 22 barrels of beer, which the aforementioned boozed away with his guests every night’. Maul also had to provide wine for some visiting officers, hay and straw for their guests, oats for the troopers' horses and, to add insult to injury, ‘ten thaler for a horse which the major took as a mount for his Fool, who was called Pointynose’. Most subsequent years brought similar billeting demands, sometimes several times, which Maul grimly itemized along with robberies by troops living in his house, as well as endless demands for contributions to sustain troops billeted elsewhere. By 1640 Maul had enriched so many soldiers (and their camp-followers, like Pointynose) that he had virtually nothing left: when he defaulted on his contributions, the three troopers sent to extract payment ‘saw for themselves that I had no money’, so after drinking beer worth three thalers ‘they agreed to leave, taking a handkerchief each which my wife gave them, worth a thaler, and some bread’.11

  The upheavals of the age brought some women fame. Queen Christina said and did things after her abdication in 1654 that would have led other women to the gallows – making fun of religion; dressing, speaking and behaving as a man; ostentatiously kissing and sleeping with other women – but, as a prestigious convert to Catholicism as well as a former queen, she enjoyed unique freedoms.12 Between 1649 and 1653, Madeleine de Scudéry published The Great Cyrus, the longest French novel ever written (2 million words; 13,000 pages; 10 volumes), which achieved enormous success because its protagonists were thinly disguised caricatures of Paris socialites and Frondeurs (Cyrus himself was obviously the prince of Condé, and so on). Yet Mlle de Scudéry was also a resolute feminist. Her novels implicitly attacked the prevailing idea of love as something rational, calculated and possessive: instead, her characters insist that love springs from the heart, not the head; and that love is only real when a man is overcome by a force stronger than himself and becomes totally submissive to a woman. Despite their enormous length, her books also appeared in English translation and reached a wide public. Elizabeth Pepys, who was not normally an avid reader, enjoyed Scudéry's books so much that one night she angered Samuel, as they travelled ‘in the coach, in her long stories out of Grand Cyrus, which she would tell, though nothing to the purpose nor in any good manner’. (Did Samuel perhaps recognize the threat to his philandering ways posed by the book's feminist views?)13

  Mlle de Scudéry also presided over a literary salon every Saturday, attended by the leading French intellectuals. One of its numerous female members was Marie-Madeleine, countess of La Fayette (1634–93), whose Princess of Cleves (1678) has been hailed as the first modern novel in French, since it offers both historical verisimilitude (it takes place at the French court a century earlier) and psychological analysis. It also reveals a noblewoman wrestling with the temptation to commit adultery with another courtier – a subject scarcely conceivable for a pre-Crisis novel, especially one written by a woman. The Princess is currently available in numerous printed editions, as a film, a ‘Kindle’ book, and a book-on-tape (duration: 5 hours 46 minutes); it forms part of France's National School Curriculum; and in 2008 Nicholas Sarkozy, then President of Fr
ance, complained how much he had ‘suffered’ from being forced to read it at school. Fame indeed.14

  Both Scudéry and La Fayette appear to have passed unscathed through the human and natural disasters of the mid-seventeenth century. Few women enjoyed such luck. Although there was no ‘typical’ experience of the global crisis, the lives of two other remarkable female survivors, and of their families, may be more representative. Wang Duangshu (c. 1621–1701) was the daughter of a scholar official in China's once wealthy Jiangnan region. Too old to fight the Qing, when their soldiers arrived in his town in 1645 her father posted on his door a sign that read ‘NO SURRENDER’ and refused to shave his head in the prescribed Manchu fashion. Instead, he fled to the mountains where he starved himself to death. Meanwhile his learned daughter, who had married an official who also refused to bow to the new regime, supported him as long as she could, through her teaching, writing and painting; but ‘when the chill and hunger became unbearable’ they left home together, taking turns at ‘pushing a cart. Desolate while on the road, they sold her calligraphy, painting and writing for a living’.15 That same year, 1645, Margaret Lucas, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria of England who had followed her mistress into continental exile, married William Cavendish, marquis of Newcastle, the defeated royalist general at Marston Moor, 30 years her senior. The couple remained in exile until the Restoration of 1660, renting the exquisite town house that Peter Paul Rubens had used as his studio, where Margaret entertained literary luminaries and wrote books. In 1656 she presented the Antwerp City Library with a five-volume set of her own works; 11 years later she was the first woman to be allowed to visit the Royal Society (where she watched an ‘experiment’ performed by Robert Boyle); and by the time of her death in 1676 she had published over 20 books on subjects as diverse as natural philosophy, poetry, love (in verse and prose), and science fiction. She also composed an autobiography that, although expressing satisfaction with her social and literary successes, devoted far more attention to the loss of almost £1 million because Parliament had sequestered all her lands and revenues, and to the pain she felt at the death of her older brother Thomas from a head wound sustained while fighting for the king in Ireland, and the execution of her younger brother Charles by firing squad after the surrender of the royalist garrison of Colchester. Both died in 1648, and the following year her sister died of ‘consumption’ (no doubt tuberculosis), followed by her mother. Margaret wrote that her mother's death was, ‘I believe, hastned through grief’ at having ‘lived to see the ruin of her children’. She concluded sadly: ‘I shall lament the loss so long as I live.’ Despite her literary eminence, in her own eyes the balance sheet of her life, which ended before she was 50, was decidedly negative.16

  The balance sheet of many states likewise showed both losses and gains. Thus although Qing China and Romanov Russia topped the list of successful dynasties, millions of their subjects lost either their lives or their freedom. In Ukraine, although Ruthenian culture flourished (and even spread to Russia), while serfdom disappeared, the name Ruina given by its historians testifies to the costs of the struggle to shake off Polish rule. Portugal exploited Spain's weakness to gain independence – the only entirely successful rebellion of the seventeenth century – but once again this success reflected immense material and personal sacrifices, including the permanent loss of most of the Lusitanian empire in Asia (and the temporary loss of its colonies in Africa and Brazil). The Dutch Republic gained formal recognition as an independent state, and carved out a lucrative trading empire in south and Southeast Asia at the expense of Portugal and independent rulers like the sultan of Mataram; but it lost its colonies in North and South America. Britain's brief Republican experiment secured the Caribbean island of Jamaica, and commercial dominance in the North Atlantic, but the Civil Wars caused the premature death of perhaps 500,000 people in Britain and Ireland, while Scotland and Ireland (the first states to rebel) temporarily lost their independence. The weakness of the Ottoman empire allowed the Austrian Habsburgs to conquer most of Hungary; while the weakness of the Spanish Habsburgs allowed Louis XIV to advance the frontiers of France – albeit, in both cases, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

  Other states suffered grave political losses in the mid-seventeenth century and gained little or nothing. The kingdom of Kongo in Africa, and the Indian nations of New England, all perished; while the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost half its population, temporarily ceased to exist as an independent state, and lost for ever its status as a Great Power. The Spanish Monarchy, too, never recovered its political pre-eminence after the secession of Portugal and its overseas empire; and although Philip IV eventually overcame his rebels elsewhere, he did so only after making major concessions (in Catalonia, for example, he left the ‘Constitutions’ intact and pardoned virtually all those who had defied him). In East Asia, the short-lived Shun dynasty founded by Li Zicheng in China disappeared without trace; while the fall of the Ming forced a reconstruction of Korean identity, because it ‘shattered the premise concerning the world order of which the Koreans felt they were a part’ (just as it required Han Chinese intellectuals to refashion themselves). Around the Great Lakes of North America, the Hurons and their allies escaped famine, disease and the Iroquois by moving west where, as Daniel Richter noted, they ‘recombined and reinvented themselves’ to create a ‘Middle Ground’ between New England and New Mexico that lasted until the late eighteenth century – but they nevertheless lost all their ancestral lands.17

  Above all, with the exception of Japan, New England and New France, the demographic balance of the seventeenth century was negative. Apart from the cases of drastic population loss already cited – Qing China; Romanov Russia and Ukraine; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; most of Germany – Philip IV ruled far fewer subjects at his death in 1665 than at his accession four decades before. Apart from the loss of his former vassals in Portugal and its empire, and along the French frontier, war devastated Catalonia, the areas of Castile along the Portuguese frontier, the Netherlands and Lombardy; while plague, recruiting and taxation depopulated large parts of the Spanish Mediterranean. Finally, in France, famines, epidemics and the civil war unleashed by the Fronde, ‘the climax of the Little Ice Age’ and the losses caused by his repeated wars meant that Louis XIV probably ruled over fewer subjects at his death in 1715 than when he began his personal rule in 1661.

  In Search of Common Denominators

  According to political scientist Mark Hagopian's book, The Phenomenon of Revolution, even

  When we have enumerated adequate sets of antecedent conditions with their respective empirical generalizations, [t]he resulting explanation or prognosis is bound to be highly complex, but those seeking simplicity should study something else than the causes of revolution. In addition, there is good reason to doubt the ‘completeness’ that any explanation of revolution could possibly attain.

  Thus inspired, let us begin with the 11 ‘antecedent conditions’ (or, as a historian might call them, ‘causes’) offered by Francis Bacon in his celebrated essay ‘Of seditions and troubles’, first published in 1612:

  The causes and motives of seditions are: innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of lawes and customs; breaking of priviledges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons; strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions growne desperate; and whatsoever, in offending people, joyneth and knitteth them in a common cause.18

  Most of these categories can be broken down into components. Thus, in his lectures to the Statistical Society of London in 1878 on ‘The famines of the world: past and present’, Cornelius Walford proposed 13 distinct causes for just one of Bacon's categories: ‘dearths’. Walford discerned six natural precipitants of harvest failure, including excessive rain, frosts, droughts, ‘plagues of insects and vermin’ and sunspot cycles, and seven more ‘artificial’ (read: human) precipitants, including war, ‘defective agriculture’, insufficient transport, legislative interference, currency manipulati
on, hoarding, and diverting grain from making bread to other purposes (such as brewing or distilling).19

  Nevertheless although Walford relied mostly on nineteenth-century data from England and British India, the same combination of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial causes’ he identified also prevailed in the seventeenth century. Famines caused by unfavourable weather were often exacerbated by ‘defective agriculture’ (farmers who refused to cultivate maize and other crops more resistant to a harsher climate); by a shortage of vessels and carts to transport food from areas with a surplus to those in deficit; by grain merchants who withheld or diverted supplies in order to increase their profits while people around them starved; and by governments that promoted economic chaos by tampering with the currency, squandered resources that might have fed the starving, and refused to make peace in order to reduce demands for troops and taxes. The seventeenth century also witnessed an ‘enigma’, noted by Walford, that ‘the very remedies which have been adopted to prevent, or to mitigate the severity of, these periodical visitations [of famine], have by some reflex action, apparently, either aided in producing them, or at least added very much to the severity of the results flowing from them’ – results that often included rebellion and sometimes revolution. Nevertheless, Walford remained convinced that extreme climatic events normally played a greater role than human action in creating catastrophe.20