Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  If

  Despite the unparalleled frequency of revolts in the mid-seventeenth century, it is possible to imagine a more peaceful world – even with the litany of ‘antecedent conditions’ listed above. As Charles I reminded the Long Parliament in November 1640, while explaining how the Scots had managed to defeat his forces so swiftly: ‘Men are so slow to believe that so great a sedition should be raised on so little ground’.33 ‘Accidents’ – totally unpredictable developments – could crucially affect the outbreak or outcome of a rebellion: the election by lot of two talented yet intransigent Catalan patriots, Pau Claris and Francesc de Tamarit, as the senior Diputats of Catalonia, in 1638 (see chapter 9); the interregnum in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created by the death of King Władysław IV just after the Cossack rebels routed its field army in 1648 (see chapter 6); the death from smallpox of William II of Orange without an adult heir just after he had defeated his domestic opponents in 1650 (see chapter 8).

  Some ‘accidents’ were more predictable – especially those caused by distance, which was (in Fernand Braudel's adage) ‘Public Enemy Number One’. Philip IV's advisers hesitated to react immediately to the revolt of Naples ‘because the state of affairs over there changes from one moment to the next, and what seems appropriate today might not be so tomorrow’; while his envoy to the Irish Catholic Confederation complained that distance constituted ‘the greatest problem of my job’ because it meant that ‘I cannot neither send successive accounts of what is happening nor receive in good time the royal orders of Your Majesty’.34 Even within the Iberian Peninsula, as Sir John Elliott noted,

  The distance between Madrid and Barcelona meant that [the viceroy's] letters and those from Madrid never kept in step. While circumstances were changing from day to day in the Principality, Madrid was at least three days behind the news, and still legislating as if the situation was exactly the same as when the viceroy had written his last set of dispatches.35

  Likewise, the central government in Madrid received the first reports of the Portuguese revolution that occurred in Lisbon on 1 December 1640 just one week later, but refused to believe them. ‘It is possible that a popular tumult might have produced a good deal of what we have heard,’ the Council of State informed Philip IV, ‘but to proclaim a king the same day is not credible.’ The king did not sign letters warning ministers in Europe about ‘the accident of Portugal’ until 15 December; he did not instruct colonial administrators to take defensive measures until 27 December; he did not warn the treasure fleets coming from America to avoid Portuguese harbours until 5 January 1641; and he did not order the closing of all frontiers, both in the peninsula and in America, to commerce with the rebels until 10 January.36

  Conversely, ‘accidents’ could also unexpectedly derail rebellions. Thus Lord Maguire's plot to seize Dublin Castle in 1641 failed only because one of the conspirators decided to betray his colleagues – but even then the magistrates ‘gave at first very little credit to so improbable and broken a [story], delivered by an unknown, mean man, well advanced in his drink’, and so sent him away. He only managed to sabotage the plot because he made a second attempt – this time successful – to betray his colleagues (albeit now too late to send a warning of the plot to Ulster, where it succeeded: see chapter 11). Likewise, ten years later, the samurai plot to seize Edo and destroy the Tokugawa regime came to light only because one of the conspirators became delirious and unwittingly shouted out the details.37 In each of these cases (and no doubt in many others) a minor ‘rewrite’ of the historical record would thus produce a dramatically different outcome; and the same is true of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which occur with little or no warning: if only the 1640s had not seen, at much the same time, the virtual disappearance of sunspots, much more volcanic activity, and double the number of El Niño episodes …

  Nevertheless, although contingency (like catastrophe) cannot be written out of history, when constructing ‘What if?’ scenarios, historians must always consider second-order (or reversionary) counterfactuals: the possibility that rewriting the short-term historical record, as in the examples above, might still not alter the long-term outcome. Reversionary counterfactuals take two forms: one positive (an ‘accident’ could delay but not permanently derail a particular development) and the other negative (a development that was, so to say, ‘an accident waiting to happen’). Positive examples are relatively easy to find. From the ‘human archive’, 22 years after the death of William II and the ‘Dutch Revolution’ that followed, his posthumous son William III recovered almost all of the traditional powers and influence of the princes of Orange; just as Charles II regained virtually all of his father's powers in all his dominions 11 years after the regicide in 1649. Turning to the ‘natural archive’, since some parts of the planet could only feed their inhabitants in ‘good years’, then even had fewer volcanic eruptions and El Niño episodes occurred in the 1640s, sooner or later ‘bad years’ would come, and they would still cause heavy mortality.

  M. de Bellièvre, the French resident in London, provided a good example of a negative ‘reversionary counterfactual’ as he contemplated the situation in Ireland in 1648. He informed Cardinal Mazarin that

  What surprises most of those who consider the affairs of that country [Ireland] is to see the people of the same country and the same religion, who know that the decision to exterminate them totally has been taken, so strongly divided by their private hatreds, so that zeal for their religion, the preservation of their country, and their own self-interest does not suffice to make them abandon – at least for a while – the passions that incite them against each other.38

  The English conquest began the following year, and within three years Confederate Ireland was no more – but, in Bellièvre's view, even if the London government had delayed its campaign of repression, internal dissention still doomed the Catholic cause to ultimate defeat. Historian Julian Goodare has proposed a similar negative ‘reversionary counterfactual’ for Scotland: given the character of both Charles I and the leading Covenanters, ‘the Scottish crisis of 1637–8, with its momentous consequences for Britain, had been waiting to happen for some time; if the Prayer Book had not ignited it, something else soon would have done.’39

  Many of Charles's fellow rulers – Qing Regent Dorgon, Tsar Alexei Romanov, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Christian IV of Denmark – displayed a similar inflexibility; and so did their principal ministers. None of them seemed prepared to contemplate alternatives to the policies they had adopted. Thus in 1632 Thomas Wentworth, later earl of Strafford, informed a colleague: ‘Let the tempest be never so great, I will much rather put forth to sea, work forth the storm, or at least be found dead with the rudder in my hand’ – an uncanny echo of the claim seven years earlier by the count-duke of Olivares that ‘As the minister with paramount obligations, it is for me to die unprotesting, chained to my oar, until not a fragment is left in my hands.’40 Although Philip IV's ministers never gave their political programme a boastful name like ‘Thorough’, they blindly pursued policies that were equally ambitious and equally unrealistic. However desperate the political situation seemed, introducing innovations and imposing additional burdens during the adverse economic and social situation caused by the Little Ice Age was sooner or later likely to provoke resistance and rebellion.

  The Two Worlds of Robinson Crusoe

  Robinson Crusoe, one of the most famous fictional inhabitants of seventeenth-century Britain, grew up during the Civil War and left home in 1651, just after the execution of Charles I; and after being marooned on a remote island he returned to his native land in 1687, just in time to witness the flight of James II and the Glorious Revolution. Yet Crusoe's ‘Strange and surprizing adventures’, first published in 1719, included not a word on these political changes. By contrast, Daniel Defoe, Crusoe's creator, repeatedly emphasized how the mental world in which his character grew up differed from the mental world of his readers. For example, Young Robinso
n kept a diary that initially resembled the spiritual journal and balance sheet maintained by many Puritans in the mid-seventeenth century (see chapter 20 above); but before long he filled it with balance sheets of profit and loss, reflecting the commercial outlook that had made England prosperous.41 Moreover, whereas England in the mid-seventeenth century had been riven by confessional strife, Crusoe despised religious intolerance. He ‘allow'd liberty of conscience throughout my dominions’ to Catholics, Protestants and pagans alike; and he considered ‘all the disputes, wranglings, strife and contention, which has happen'd in the world about religion, whether niceties in doctrines or schemes of church government, they were all perfectly useless to us, as for ought I can yet see, they have been to all the rest of the world’. Crusoe's enthusiasm for religious toleration did not stem from a desire to attract religious refugees (as under Cromwell) but because it was essential for profitable international trade (which Crusoe pursued with great success).42 Finally, Crusoe successfully practised the ‘new philosophy’ (see chapter 22 above). He salvaged from his wrecked ship ‘infinitely more than I knew what to do with’, leading to the ‘reflection, that all the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our use’; and that, on the contrary, ‘All I could make use of, was all that was valuable’. Crusoe also became a successful planter, and soon found that his two most valuable assets were tools (‘the carpenter's chest’ he salvaged was ‘much more valuable than a ship loading of gold would have been’) and labour: Crusoe saved ‘my man Friday’, a Native American, from cannibals and immediately set him to work on his ‘colony’ (Crusoe's term), where the first English word he had to learn was ‘Master’. So although Crusoe ‘had never handled a tool in all my life’ yet ‘I improv'd myself in this time in all the mechanick exercises, which my necessities put me upon applying myself to’.43 A clearer example of the impact of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ would be hard to find.

  The world of 1719 differed from the world of 1651 in one other important respect: the frequency and violence both of volcanic eruptions and El Niño events diminished, the current 11-year sunspot cycle resumed, and the long episode of global cooling came to an end. The benign climate, coinciding with a more systematic exploitation of the environment, allowed the supply of goods to increase faster than demand for them, and so permitted rapid population growth in more fertile areas. In China, the Kangxi emperor noted in 1716 that the population grew ‘day after day’, unlike the available arable land, and complained – just like his predecessors a century before – about the increase in the number of ‘unproductive consumers’, singling out intellectuals, merchants and clerics. A few years later, a senior official in Fujian estimated that ‘the population had doubled’ during the previous six decades. He also complained that ‘while the population increases daily, the amount of land under cultivation does not’. The following year, the central government launched a drive to bring more land under cultivation because ‘population has increased of late, so how can [the people] obtain their livelihood? Land reclamation is the only solution.’44 Thanks to such measures, by the mid-eighteenth century both East Asia and western Europe boasted a far denser population than ever before – but this time without a decline in life expectancies or standard of living. Equally important, the new equilibrium of population and resources made the demands of the fiscal-military state more bearable. The return of a warmer climate had broken the ‘fatal synergy’.

  Nevertheless, the same dynamic of subsistence prevailed, and continues to prevail. Societies in which the demand for food exceeds the supply must either increase supply (by adopting technological changes that improve crop yields per acre, by mobilizing a new source of energy, or by securing food elsewhere by trade or by force); or else they must reduce demand (by eating less, or by reducing the number of mouths to be fed through fewer births, increased migration, or more deaths). All these strategies played their part in coping with the problems caused by the fatal synergy of human and natural factors in the seventeenth century. Many starved and many more went hungry; while more abortions and infanticides, more delayed or forgone marriages, and more migration (both forced and voluntary) reduced the number of mouths to feed. Yet, since all these adaptive measures took effect only slowly, in most societies around the world food supply and demand only came back into equilibrium after ‘enough’ people had died.

  Although blind, and confined to his house, John Milton understood this dynamic as clearly as any contemporary. He began to compose Paradise Lost in London during the landmark winter of 1658, and continued through the years of dearth that accompanied the Restoration of Charles II, so it is hardly surprising that unpredictable and unforgiving changes in the climate are central to his story. Milton's fictional world, like the real one in which he lived, was (as he termed it) a ‘universe of death’ at the mercy of extremes of heat and cold.

  At certain revolutions all the damned

  Are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change

  Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,

  From beds of raging fire to starve in ice

  Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine

  Immovable, infixed, and frozen round

  Periods of time; thence hurried back to fire.45

  Epilogue: ‘It's the climate, stupid’1

  ONCE UPON A TIME, THE HISTORY OF CLIMATE WAS A ‘HOT TOPIC’. IN 1979 the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation paid for 250 historians, geographers, archaeologists and climatologists from 30 countries to attend the first international ‘Conference on Climate and History’, hosted by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (England) – a unit sponsored by (among others) British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell. Cambridge University Press later published a volume containing the most innovative of the conference papers. That same year, the World Meteorological Organization created the ‘World Climate Program’ with a mandate to ‘insert climatic considerations into the formulation of rational policy alternatives’. No one doubted then either that global climate had undergone dramatic changes in the past or that, sooner or later, it would undergo equally dramatic changes in the future.2

  These initiatives took place in the shadow of a world food crisis: the price of wheat tripled and that of rice quintupled between 1972 and 1974, a reflection of harvest failures in South Asia, North America, the Sahel and the USSR, themselves a reflection of the strong El Niño episode of 1971–2 which suggested that a system of teleconnections might explain how the global climate ‘worked’. The United Nations therefore convened a ‘World Food Conference’ in 1974, which made the solemn ‘Declaration’ that: ‘As it is the common responsibility of the entire international community to ensure the availability at all times of adequate world supplies of basic food-stuffs by way of appropriate reserves, all countries should co-operate in the establishment of an effective world system of food security.’ The Conference's equally solemn ‘Resolutions’ included:

  • ‘Achievement of a desirable balance between population and food supply’.

  • ‘Reduction of military expenditure for the purpose of increasing food production’; and

  • ‘[Creating] a global information and early warning system on food and agriculture’.

  Before governments had time to enact these resolutions, however, the ‘shadow of a world food crisis’ disappeared thanks to the ‘Green Revolution’: new high-yielding varieties of wheat, maize and rice, combined with the increased use of irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, dramatically increased food production. Famines virtually disappeared from the headlines and climate change virtually disappeared from the research agenda of historians.3

  Then in 1990 the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ (IPCC), another United Nations initiative, issued its first Assessment Report, summarizing the research of ‘several hundred working scientists
from 25 countries’. The document claimed that ‘emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases’, and that without immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ‘additional warming of the Earth's surface’ was inevitable. To clarify the scale of the problem, the Report called on colleagues to ‘further investigate changes which took place in the past’. The response of the scholarly community, including many historians, has been magnificent: since 1990 they have compiled thousands of data-sets and published hundreds of articles about past climate change, revealing a series of significant shifts that culminated in an unprecedented trend of global warming.4

  Unlike the research presented in the 1970s, these new findings have been ignored, rejected and belittled; while suggestions that states should ‘insert climatic considerations into the formulation of rational policy alternatives’ also provoke passionate opposition. Just after he became Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee of the United States Senate in 2003, Senator James Inhofe declared global warming to be the ‘greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people’.5 In 2011 Senator Inhofe co-sponsored legislation (the Upton-Inhofe bill) that would prevent the federal government from ‘promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas to address climate change’; while later that year the United States House of Representatives defeated by 240 votes to 184 a motion known as the ‘Waxman Amendment’ stating that ‘climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare’.6

  The Waxman Amendment conflated two distinct issues: determining whether ‘human activities’ (notably, the emission of greenhouse gases and deforestation) can produce climate change is not the same as proving that ‘climate change’ occurs. There may perhaps be residual doubts about the first proposition, just as some still deny that smoking tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer, but the historical record leaves no doubt that climatic change occurs, and that it can have catastrophic consequences for ‘public health and welfare’. Although humans appear to have played no part in precipitating the climate changes of the seventeenth century, they suffered and died from its consequences all the same.