Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  57. Soman, Sorcellerie, I, 797 and IV, 22. Infanticide cases made up almost one-third of all homicide cases heard by the court and, according to Soman, the foremost expert on the subject, to suppose that the Parlement and other courts of early modern France executed 5,000 women for infanticide ‘would be a conservative estimate’.

  58. Statutes of the realm, 21 Jac. I c 27; Wrightson, ‘Infanticide’ (infanticide cases made up almost one-fifth of all homicides brought before the Essex courts 1624–64); Gowing, ‘Secret births’.

  59. William Shakespeare, The tragical history of Hamlet, prince of Denmark (c. 1600), Act 3, Scene 1: Hamlet, feigning madness, tells his beloved Ophelia: ‘Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?’

  60. A census of all male religious in Italy and its adjacent islands (Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily) conducted in 1650 revealed almost 70,000 monks and friars (in over 6,000 convents): Boaga, La soppressione, 150. Since most towns recorded as many or more females as males in Holy Orders (albeit in fewer convents), the overall number of Italian nuns was probably about the same. I calculated the percentage of nuns in the total urban population by dividing the latter by two (approximately half the population was female).

  61. ‘Galarana Baratotti’ [Elena Tarrabotti], La simplicità ingannata and L'inferno monacale. Quotation from the extracts translated in Dooley, Italy in the Baroque, 417.

  62. The magistrates of Milan expressed alarm at the sharp increase in young women being sent to convents in 1627–32 – years of famine, plague and war. See Sperling, Convents, 26–8; Vigorelli, Vita e processo, 174–89; Zannetti, La demografia, 60; and Hunecke, ‘Kindbett oder Kloster’, 452–6.

  63. For Madrid, Carbajo Isla, La población, 257–67, plus calculations from the number of baptized foundlings recorded in AHN Consejos, 41,391; for Seville, Álvarez Santaló, Marginación social, 44 and graph on p. 47; for London, Fildes, ‘Maternal feelings’, 143 (quotation) and 156 (graph of foundling totals and bread prices).

  64. AHN Consejos, 41,391, n.p., ‘Juez de comisión para la aberiguación de los fraudes que se an echo en el ospital de los niños expósitos’ (I thank Fernando Bouza for bringing this volume to my attention). Álvarez Santaló, Marginación social, 213, provides another example of a first-person appeal (from Seville).

  65. Viazzo et al., ‘Five centuries’, 78–87, based on the records of the Spedale degli Innocenti, the first dedicated foundling hospital in Europe.

  66. For Scotland, see Canny, Europeans on the move, 80–5; Murdoch, Scotland, 14, 19–20; and Cullen, Famine in Scotland, ch. 6. Gordon, Diary, names almost 250 Scots whom he met in Poland and Russia between 1655 and 1667. For Portugal, I thank the demographers of the Gulbenkian Foundation at Oeiras for providing figures. Note that the Scottish migrants came disproportionately from the Highlands and the Portuguese overwhelmingly from the north.

  67. Felix, The Chinese in the Philippines, I, 46; Blussé, Strange company, 74 and 83.

  68. For details, and for the term ‘co-colonization’, see Andrade, How Taiwan became Chinese.

  69. Ochoa, Epistolaro español, II, 64, Cristóbal Crespi, 16 May 1627.

  70. Cervantes Saavedra, La segunda parte de el ingenioso hidalgo, ch. 24: ‘A la guerra me lleva, mi necesidad/Si tuviera dineros, no fuera en verdad’; Corvisier, L'Armée française, 1, 317, quoting Marshal Villars.

  71. Manuel de Melo, Historia de los movimientos, 38–40. On the urgent need for temporary labour in cultivating rice (and indeed cotton and silk), see Elvin, ‘Blood and statistics’, 149–51.

  72. Manuel de Melo, Historia de los movimientos, 38–40; and ch. 9 above. Parets, De los muchos sucesos (Memorial Histórico Español, XX, 75–6) notes that the segadors almost rebelled during the famine of summer 1631 as well.

  73. Stepto, Lieutenant Nun. For other examples of cross-dressing, which was more common than one might think, see Dekker and van de Pol, The tradition of female transvestitism.

  74. Ko, Teachers, 171, quoting Hu. Nevertheless, surviving pairs of snow shoes, straw sandals and padded overshoes made for women with bound feet reproduced in Ko, Every step, 16, prove that they could travel; and in the 1660s bound feet did not prevent Woman Wang first from eloping and then from returning to her village after her lover abandoned her (Spence, Woman Wang, 117–24, 128, 136). Nor did foot-binding spare women from performing heavy labour (Mann, Precious records, 167–8). Sandy Bolzenius reminds me that since foot-binding no doubt increased the risk of rape, it would also have increased the likelihood of suicide by the victims.

  75. Opitz, ‘Trostgedichte’, 194 (Opitz dared not publish his poem until 1633); Foster, The English factories in India, 1630–2, 146, the English factors at Surat to their colleagues in Java, 22 Apr. 1631 (see also ch. 13 above).

  76. Chen Zilong, ‘The little cart’, from Waley, Translations, 325. William S. Atwell, who generously brought the poem to my attention, has shown that Chen must have written it while visiting North China in 1637.

  77. MacKay, The limits, 137; Vassberg, The village, 113; Ruiz Ibáñez, Dos caras, 331 n. 1,873. The government sometimes marched its conscripts to ‘hell’ chained together, in order to avoid desertion: Ruiz Ibáñez, Dos caras, 334. For the same treatment of conscripts in Naples, see ch. 14 below.

  78. Levi, ‘Hindus beyond the Hindu Kush’, 283–4, quoting the chronicle of François Pelsaert; RPCS, I, 385, Order of 22 Aug. 1626.

  79. Kupperman, The Jamestown project, 292, quoting John Chamberlain in 1618 and Patrick Copland in 1622. Unfortunately, the Company did not send adequate provisions with these ‘creatures’, which explains why many starved: see ch. 15 above.

  80. Baily, A true & faithful warning, 8–9 (Baily's experience turned him from Catholic to Quaker and he wrote ‘A true & faithfull relation of some of his sufferings’ from gaol); Donoghue, ‘“Out of the land of bondage”’, 961.

  81. Charbonneau, Naissance, 128 (about half of the ‘Filles du Roy’ came from the Paris orphanage: see Dumas, Les filles du roi, 48).

  82. Hathaway, Beshir Agha, 18, quantifies the African slave trade to Ottoman Egypt.

  83. Figures from Schwartz, ‘Silver, sugar and slaves’, 10–11, quoting Fernando de Silva Solís; and Donoghue, ‘“Out of the land of bondage”’, 966. Further details in ch. 15 below.

  84. T'ien, Male anxiety, 85 (poem); calculation in Lee and Wang, One quarter, 107–8; and Lee et al., ‘Infant and child mortality’, 404.

  85. Goubert, Beauvais, 607–12, was the first to note the cyclical nature of these subsistence crises, each creating a ‘classe creuse’ (depleted cohort). In 1740–2 another famine struck the ‘classe creuse’ afflicted by the Great Winter.

  86. Details in Peters, Ein Söldnerleben. Helferrich, The Thirty Years War, 276–302, includes details on these deaths in her partial English translation of Hagendorf's diary.

  87. Sella, ‘Peasant strategies’, 468–9, quotes a visitor to an Alpine valley in 1625 who graphically described the impact of massive male migration on households now headed by women.

  88. Goldstone, Revolution and rebellion, 138; table adapted from Adamson, ‘England without Cromwell’, 463 – both based on data assembled by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

  89. Goldstone, Revolution and rebellion, 137–8. At p. 248 Goldstone notes that a similar increase in the size of the under-30 population also occurred in France in the decades before the revolution of 1789: a tantalizing parallel.

  90. T'ien, Male anxiety, 31. Ng, ‘Ideology’, 68, links an apparent prevalence of sodomy in Fujian to the surplus of bachelors.

  91. Sen, Poverty and famines, 1.

  92. Kaplan, The famine plot persuasion, 2. Kaplan examines the ‘plots’ invoked to ‘explain’ six dearths in eighteenth-century France. He could also have found abundant evidence from the seventeenth century.

  93. Bossuet, Politics, 65 (Book III, article iii).

  Part II. Enduring the Crisis

  1. Jia Yi, a Chinese political thinke
r of the second century BC, quoted in Elvin and Liu, Sediments of time, epigraph.

  2. Elliott, ‘Revolution and continuity’, 110.

  3. Clark, The European crisis, 3–5 (Clark) and 301 (Elliott); Kamen, The iron century, 335–6. Clark's volume included 16 studies of the various manifestations of crisis in Europe; but none noted that the same problems affected other continents or considered the episode of global cooling: see details in Parker, ‘La crisis’.

  4. See Des Forges, Cultural centrality, 40–1 and 76–7 on Yang Dongming and his Album of the famished.

  5. These and other data quoted in Parker, ‘La crisis’.

  6. Steensgaard, ‘The seventeenth-century crisis’, 33, originally written in 1970.

  Chapter 5 The ‘Great Enterprise’ in China, 1618–84

  1. Special thanks for help with this chapter to Tonio Andrade, William S. Atwell, Cynthia Brokaw, Timothy Brook, Roger Des Forges, Nicola Di Cosmo, Ann Jannetta, Kenneth Pomeranz, Evelyn Rawski, Christopher Reed, Lynn Struve, Kenneth Swope, Joanna Waley-Cohen and Ying Zhang in the United States; to Wang Jiafan and Chen Ning Ning in China; and to Hayami Akira, Iwai Shigeki, Kishimoto Mio, Mikami Takekiho, Shiba Yoshinobu and Yanagisawa Akira in Japan. I thank Taguchi Kojiro for research assistance with material in East Asian languages. I have used Pinyin Romanization for all Chinese names, except when quoting from older works that used the Wade-Giles system.

  2. Xia, Xingcun lu (1645) quoted in Struve, Qing formation, 334.

  3. Brook, The troubled empire, 254–5.

  4. Size based on Ho, Population, 102, but note that 1,161 million mou at 0.1647 acres per mou = 191.3 million acres and not 176 million acres as Ho stated.

  5. Brook, The troubled empire, 243; CHC, IX, 40, quoting a Manchu document from 1615.

  6. Iwai, ‘The collapse’, 6, quoting Mao Yuanyi; Nakayama, ‘On the fluctuation’, 74.

  7. Details from Des Forges, Cultural centrality, 109, 166–8 and 178–80.

  8. Fei, Negotiating urban space, ch. 1 (quotation from p. 43). The unusual name ‘Single Whip’ arose from the Chinese title yitiao bianfa, ‘the conversion of tax assessments into a single item’ – but because bian means not only ‘convert’ but also ‘whip’, ‘single item’ became ‘single whip’.

  9. Wakeman and Grant, Conflict and control, 7–10.

  10. Data from Huang, Taxation, 145–7, 155, 173–4 and 261–5; idem, ‘Military expenditures’, 60; idem, ‘Fiscal administration’, 85 and 120–2; Des Forges, Cultural centrality, 18 and 32–4; and Chan, Glory and fall, 199–201 and 310–14. One minister proposed to cover the deficit with government promissory notes, but had no idea who would accept them.

  11. Chan, Glory and fall, 189–97; Las Cortes, Voyage en Chine, 183–8; Semedo, Historica relatione, 126–7.

  12. Las Cortes, Voyage en Chine, 183–8; Chang and Chang, Crisis, 269, quoting the Mingshi.

  13. Dardess, Blood and history, 60, quoting Censor Zhou Zongjian. On the Donglin academy see, apart from Dardess, Busch, ‘The Tunglin Academy’; and Dennerline, The Chia-Ting Loyalists, 158–71. Tonio Andrade reminds me that jingshi jimin appeared in such popular works of Ming China as Romance of the three kingdoms: see ch. 18 below.

  14. On Wei's triumph, see Tong, Disorder, 112; ECCP, 846–7; Tsai, The eunuch, 4–6; and Wu, ‘Corpses on display’. On the ‘blacklists’, see Zhang, ‘Politics and morality’, 166–71. Miller, State versus gentry, chs 4 and 5, argues convincingly that Wei was more efficient and Donglin more disruptive than often portrayed in Western sources.

  15. Dardess, Blood and history, 163, quoting the ‘Veritable records’ of the Chongzhen reign.

  16. Zhang, ‘Politics and morality’, 229–30.

  17. Dardess, Blood and history, 166, quoting the Mingshi. Of course, since the official history of the Ming was compiled under the Qing, it sought to justify their ‘Great Enterprise’ rather than present an impartial account of events. (I thank Joanna Waley-Cohen for this point.)

  18. Names from Parsons, The peasant rebellions, 8.

  19. Tong, Disorder, 84, summarizes the penalties in the Ming Code for bandits; Song, Zhongguo Gudai, notes ‘serious droughts’ (da han) in Gazetteers from both Hebei and Shaanxi provinces. See also the annual climate maps in Zhongguo Jin-wubai-nian.

  20. Details from Chan, Glory and fall, 336–8; Ch'ü, Local government, 154–5; and Wakeman, ‘China and the seventeenth-century crisis’, 13–14. Gu Yanwu, writing soon after 1644, blamed the fall of the Ming primarily on the decision to close the courier stations: Brook, The confusions of pleasure, 173–4.

  21. Cheng and Lestz, The search for Modern China, 5, quoting Song Yingxing, a government official, in 1636. See Chan, Glory and fall, 233–4, and Parsons, Peasant rebellions, 24, for similar reports on the droughts and famines of these years; and Zhang, ‘A test of climate’, on the weak monsoons.

  22. Chan, Glory and fall, 229–30, citing Wu Yingji, Loushantang ji, published in 1639. Wu (1594–1645) was a Donglin sympathizer, a member of the Fu She, a Ming loyalist and author of Qizhen liangchao bofulu (‘Record of the calamities in the Tianqi and Chongzhen reigns’, covering 1624–8).

  23. Details from Song, Zhongguo gudai, gazetteer records from 1633–6 (categories 4–1 and 4–12); Perdue, Exhausting the earth, 208–9; Will, ‘Un cycle hidraulique’, 276; and Zhongguo Jin-wubai-nian (maps).

  24. Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 168–90, describes the transfer of technology and the siege of Dalinghe. See also Elliott, Manchu Way, 75, and Rawski and Rawson, China, 156–7, on the Eight Banners.

  25. Elliott, ‘Whose empire’; Struve, Ming-Qing conflict, 167–8; and Crossley, A translucent mirror, part II.

  26. Ko, ‘The body as attire’, 17, cites Hong Taiji's edicts.

  27. Struve, Ming-Qing conflict, 173–4, notes the contrasting advice contained in a collection of Manchu state papers from 1638. See Perdue, China marches west, 119–20, on food shortages in Manchuria at this time.

  28. Ming shilu, ‘Treatise on the Five Elements’ for the Chongzhen era (translation kindly provided by William S. Atwell).

  29. Des Forges, Cultural centrality, 62, quoting the report of Wang Han, ‘Sketches of a disaster’, May 1640. The illustrations have apparently not survived (ibid., 350 n. 96) but probably resembled those of Yang Dongming during the famine of 1594: plates 5 and 17. See also Song, Zhongguo gudai, category 4–7 for 1640.

  30. Dunstan, ‘The late Ming epidemics’, 9–10 and map 6 (1641); Zhongguo Jin-wubai-nian (climate maps); Brook, The troubled empire, 250–1 (Shanghai and Shandong). See also Song, Zhongguo gudai, categories 4–7 and 4–14 for 1641; and Sato, Chukogu, 243–4.

  31. Janku, ‘“Heaven-sent disasters”, 233–4; Marks, Tigers, 134, 138–9, and especially the figures on 139 and 141.

  32. Smith, The art of doing good, 162; Will and Wong, Nourish the people, 25–6 and 434; Needham and Bray, SCC, VI.ii, 64–70 (on Xu Guangqi's Nong zheng chuan shu) and 402–23 (on granaries). Further examples in ch. 1 above.

  33. Chen Qide, Zaihuang Zhishi (Record of disastrous famine), quoted by Atwell, ‘East Asia and the “World Crisis”’, 6–7; Dunstan, ‘The late Ming epidemics’, 12; Nakayama, ‘On the fluctuation’, 74.

  34. Brook, Vermeer's hat, 175; Smith, The art of doing good, 137 and 153, quoting the diary of Lu Shiyi, from Taicang in Nanzhili; and Will, ‘Coming of age’, 30, quoting Yao Tinglin, Linian ji [Record of successive years]. It is tempting to dismiss reports of cannibalism as mere rhetoric, but Li, Fighting famine, 34–7, 261, 273–4, 300, 304, 358–9 and 361, found the expression ‘people ate each other’ (‘ren xiang shi’) with some frequency in documents concerning seventeenth-century famines.

  35. Semedo, Historica relatione, 7.

  36. Ho, Studies, 261–2, quoting Xie Zhaozhe, Wu za zu (1608); and Shenmiao liuzhong zoushu huiyao 6.20b, a selection of memorials sent by ministers to the Wanli emperor, but tabled without action. Cynthia Brokaw informs me that this one, by Yao Yongji, referred to population pressure, especially in Jiangnan.


  37. On the ‘closing’ of Japan, see ch. 3 above; total silver arrivals from Marks, Tigers, 142, and Atwell, ‘Another look’; tax increases in von Glahn, Fountain, 177.

  38. Robinson, Bandits, 5–6, on urban disorders; Marmé, ‘Survival’, 145; and idem, ‘Locating linkages’, 1,083, quoting Ye Shaoyuan.

  39. Fong, ‘Reclaiming subjectivity’, 32 (quoting Ye on the looting of 1640). Will, ‘Coming of age’, 25–7, provides a graphic account of the sack of a Shanghai mansion.

  40. Quotations from Tong, Disorder, 83–4; and Kessler, K'ang-hsi, 15, Memorial by Wei Yijie in 1660.

  41. Agnew, ‘Culture and power’, 46, letter from the Kong dukes to a provincial official about the release of Li Mi, alias Wei Tongjiao, and 51, quoting the first Qing governor of Shandong in 1644.

  42. Qin Huitian, Wuli tongkao (1761).

  43. Data from Elman, Cultural history (especially pp. 128, 141, 177 and 424); Miyazaki, China's examination hell, 39–40; and Zhang, Chinese gentry, 33–42. The three levels of degree holder meant, literally, ‘raw’ or ‘student’ (sheng) member of a group (yuan); ‘elevated’ (ju) ‘man’ (ren); and ‘advanced’ (jin) ‘scholar’ (shih).

  44. Naturally the system had serious flaws. Not only was it effectively limited to boys from families with sufficient resources to ‘spare’ a son to undertake prolonged intensive study, but it also excluded those from ‘base professions’ (such as actors, couriers and brothel-keepers). Moreover, although the exam itself was free, the cost of travel to the exam venue, lodging, thank-you gifts to the examiners and tips to the staff exceeded what many families could afford (Miyazaki, China's examination hell, 118).

  45. Data from Elman, Cultural history, 143, 286, 290; Miyazaki, China's examination hell, 121–2; and CHC, VIII ii, 712–15.

  46. Calculation from Ho, Ladder, 181. If there were 120 million Chinese around 1640, then perhaps 30 million were males aged 20 or above: 500,000 shengyuan thus meant one in 60 adult males. Brook, The troubled empire, 150, noted the number of students who failed, and also the ‘body of students vying for spots in the Confucian schools’.