Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  63. Acta Pacis Westphalicae: supplementa electronica, IPO, V:50; Wallis, A defence of the Royal Society, 7.

  64. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 365–71, ‘An Act of free and general pardon’; Anderson, The journal, 173, Court Martial, 7 Apr. 1665; Stoyle, ‘“Memories of the maimed”’; Young, Faith, 54.

  65. Plumb, The growth, xvi–xviii and 1. Scotland, Ireland and Anglo-America were, of course, a different story. I first heard Dr Plumb (as he then was) expound his thesis in Oxford in 1965, when I attended his Ford's Lectures. It was a thrill to discover, 45 years later, that it still rings true.

  Chapter 21 From Warfare State to Welfare State

  1. Meyer, ‘Ein italienisches Urteil’, 160–1; Ray, Observations, 81–2 (Mannheim and Heidelberg) and 140 (Vienna); Skippon, An account, 432 (Mannheim), 439–40 (Heidelberg), and 476 (Vienna). Both Englishmen became Fellows of the Royal Society through their prowess in observations. I thank Kenneth Pomeranz for many helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

  2. Meyer, ‘Ein italienisches Urteil’, 160–1; Ray, Observations, 109; Patin, Relations (1671), 144, 199–200, 212.

  3. AUB Ms 2538, ‘Triennial travels’, III/7v (Munich), 8 (Regensburg); Gordon, Diary, II, 8 and 36 (1659).

  4. Li, Fighting famine, 9; Fong, ‘Writing’, 268–73. She observes ‘The experience of loss and dislocation was so complex and traumatic that, for those who had the means and the skill, writing must have served as a therapeutic means of regaining some sense of control, order, and poetic dignity.’ I thank Nicola Di Cosmo for pointing out the rarity of visual representations of military themes in Han Chinese art.

  5. Li Wen, ‘On the road’, graciously translated for me by Lynn Struve (on Li's journey see Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 678–80); Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 761, printed Chen's poem (with another in note 127).

  6. Meyer-Fong, Building culture, 134 (other data from ibid., 5, 12, 20, 77–8, 141–2 and 174–80).

  7. Nieuhof, An embassy, 3 (preface), 85 (Yangzhou), and 64 (Nanchang). The English edition claims that only 8,000 were slain at Canton, but Nieuhof's original Dutch manuscript clearly states 80,000: see BNF, Cartes et plans, Ms In 80 17, fo. 30. Likewise the English edition claims that Hukon enjoyed a lively trade when the Dutch visited in 1656, but Nieuhof's original text makes clear that this was ‘voor de destructie van China’: ibid., fo. 61.

  8. Nieuhof, An embassy, 65 (Qing policy), 39 (Canton) and 84 (along the Grand Canal). Compare the similar expression of Semedo, just before the conquest: pages 23–4 above.

  9. Brantôme, Oeuvres, VI, 326; La Noue, Discours, 160.

  10. Ansaldo, Peste, 204–8. Del Pino Jiménez, ‘Demografía rural Sevillana’, 500–2, found the same surge immediately after the devastating plague of 1649 in the Andalusian towns he studied.

  11. Sreenivasan, Peasants, 289–92 and 322–3 (all quotations). Theibault, German villages, 199, noted that, to repopulate his lands, the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel waived the normal ‘residence tax’ for any demobilized soldier who came and settled.

  12. Felloni, ‘Per la storia’; Eldem, The Ottoman city, 98–102 (by Daniel Goffman); Bustos Rodríguez, Cádiz, passim; and archival data communicated by Professor Bustos in Sep. 2006, for which I am most grateful.

  13. Venezia e la peste, 98; Hagen, ‘Seventeenth-century crisis’, 325 (quoting the edict of 1661); Archivio di Stato, Lucca, Anziani al tempo della libertà, buste 707–8.

  14. Jespersen, A revolution, 279–96; Lappalainen, ‘Finland's contribution’, fig. 9; Oschmann, Der Nürnberger Exekutionstag (on payments to veterans of the Swedish Army). The pleas of penniless war widows presented by Ailes, ‘Wars, widows’, show that for the families of many Swedish soldiers and sailors, the ‘continental war’ proved both a personal and a financial disaster.

  15. Wheeler, The making, 212, notes the money paid to English veterans. Firth, Cromwell's Army, 197 and 206, noted that only those in service at the Restoration received their pay – the numerous officers purged in 1659 received nothing. Reece ‘Military Presence’, Appendix, suggests that 25,000 soldiers served in England in 1660.

  16. Ray, Observations, 221, and Skippon, An account, 550–1 (both in 1663). On the destruction, see SIDES, La popolazione, 43–7; and Externbrink, ‘Die Rezeption des “Sacco di Mantova”’.

  17. Sreenivasan, The peasants, 348, quoting statements by the magistrates of Memmingen in 1600 and 1702.

  18. Rawski, ‘The Qing formation’, 217–18, notes the pawnshops; demographic data from Pomeranz, ‘Is there an East Asian development path?’, 325–6; acreage from Ho, Studies, 102 (but note the caveat on page 730 n. 4 to ch. 5 above). Other information from Huang, Peasant economy, 85–6; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 84; and Will, ‘Développement quantitatif’.

  19. Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib his legacie. Kerridge, The agricultural revolution, first published in 1967, produced a barrage of examples of agrarian ‘improvement’ in England during the later seventeenth century. Mark Overton, An agricultural revolution, later dismissed this evidence and argued that little changed before 1750. The rival claims may be reconciled by noting that Kerridge drew most of his examples from East Anglia, where lighter soils facilitated innovation, whereas Overton concentrated on the Midlands, with heavier soils. For similar improvements in Japan, see ch. 16 above.

  20. Ho, Studies, 146, quoting a Gazetteer of 1760; Mazumdar, ‘The impact’, 69; Wong, China transformed, 28 (calculations from lineages in Tongcheng county).

  21. Goldstone, Revolution, 372.

  22. Quotations from de Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 10 and 128, with more examples from his ch. 4, entitled ‘Consumer demand’, and his subsequent article, ‘The limits’.

  23. Clunas, Superfluous things, charted the Ming boom; on Suzhou, see Marmé, ‘Survival’, 145–55.

  24. Marmé, ‘Survival’, 156–9 (guilds); Nieuhof, An embassy, 69 (shipping) and 75 (Nanjing). Compare the similar description of Semedo in the 1630s, page 24 above. In 2002 the number of vessels sailing up and down the Yangzi near Nanjing deeply impressed the present writer.

  25. Marmé, ‘Survival’, 144, quoting Kangxi and Cao Yin, and 151 (jinshi score: 785 in the Qing period); Will, ‘Coming of age’, 38–9, quoting Yao's Jishi shiyi (‘Remembrances not yet recorded’).

  26. Details from Perdue, ‘Water control’. Dongting lake still expands from 2,000 to 12,000 square miles in the flood season (between July and September), but Poyang lake is now larger.

  27. Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires, I, 118–20.

  28. Nieuhof, An embassy, 81 (Grand Canal) and 104 (Tianjin); Brook, The confusions, 48 (estimate by Gu Yanwu).

  29. AUB Ms 2538, ‘Triennial travels’, I/29; Morrice, Entring book, IV, 331, entry for 6 Nov. 1688.

  30. Once again, I thank Professor Kishimoto Mio for sharing her ‘model’ concept for China with me during a seminar at International House Tokyo in July 2010, and her speculation on that occasion that ‘we can find some parallels on the other side of Eurasia as well’.

  31. Hull, The economic writings, I, 91 and 94 (A treatise of taxes, ch. XV, ‘Of excise’); North, Discourses, 14. De Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 58–64, makes the interesting suggestion that a positive attitude towards the ‘new luxuries’ originated with the Jansenists who saw ‘self-love’ as a useful and constructive passion.

  32. Defoe, The compleat English tradesman, II, part 1, 99–102 and 107 (climate); the last hurrah appears in his A tour, I, ‘the author's preface’.

  33. Yang, ‘Economic Justification for Spending’, 51, quoting an essay by Lu Chi of Shanghai, c. 1540, quoting Mencius; Kishimoto-Nakayama, ‘Kangxi depression’, 241–2, quoting an essay by Wei Shixiao, c. 1680. Defoe made the same point: ‘moderation’, he wrote, would throw ‘maid-servants’ as well as farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen out of work: The compleat English tradesman, II, part 1, 99–102.

  34. Defoe, A tour, I, ‘The author's preface’ (published in 1724, after 40 years of travels and observation); Defoe, The co
mpleat English tradesman, II, part 1, 99–102.

  35. Wheeler, The making, 148, 198. Its lineal successor, value added tax, remains the third largest source of British revenue: an extraordinary legacy of the Global Crisis.

  36. Details from Bogart, ‘Did the Glorious Revolution contribute?’

  37. Wheeler, The making, 213; Mallet, Comptes rendus, 286–7 (when in the early eighteenth century Mallet reviewed the records of the French treasury, he found no meaningful figures for the quinquennium 1656–60, such was the fiscal chaos: ibid., 240); European State Finance Database, http://esfdb.websites.bta.com/Default.aspx, last accessed 4 Feb. 2012.

  38. Ogilvie quoted page 52 above; Scott, Seeing like a state, 11.

  39. Wu, Communication, 34–6 and 48–9; Janku, ‘Heaven-sent disasters’, 239–41.

  40. Virol, ‘Connaître’, 851 and 855, demonstrates the Chinese influence on Vauban's plans for a ‘Dîme royale’.

  41. Colbert, Lettres, I, 251–2, Colbert to Mazarin, 30 Aug. 1656, and reply dated 9 Sep. Soll, ‘Accounting’, 234, describes the volume prepared each year for the royal pocket. Colbert, Lettres, II part 2, 771–83, published the contents of the volume for 1680 (which included a summary of state income and expenditure between 1662 and 1680). On the opposition of the judges to Mazarin, see chapter 10 above.

  42. Vauban, Méthode généralle, 14–15, published May 1686.

  43. Virol, ‘Connaître’, and idem, Vauban, with additional data from Vauban's archive: ANF AP 155 Mi 1–68. The first detailed survey was carried out in the town of Douai, of which Vauban was governor, in 1682, and covers 91 folios: ANF AP 155 Mi 14/22; extract in Virol, ‘Connaître’, 873. Vauban thus amassed as much detail as the surveys of Japan by the Toyotomi and Tokugawa regimes, albeit not on a national scale (see ch. 16 above). See also Virol, Vauban, 192–4, for a 17-page ‘Supputation’ entitled ‘Chronologie des cochons’.

  44. ‘Moyen de retablir nos colonies de l'Amérique et de les accroître en peu de temps’ (1699), in Vauban, Les oisivitiés, 539–73, quotation from p. 571. The actual population of French Canada in 2000 was scarcely seven million (and that of all Canada not even 31 million).

  45. Virol, Vauban, 204 (‘Du nombre d'hommes’), 212 (noting that other practitioners of ‘political arithmetic’ made the same assumptions), and 213 (dearth is ‘dans l'opinion et non dans la réalité’: from a Mémoire of 1694).

  46. Soll, ‘Accounting’, 237; Plumb, The growth, 11–13.

  47. Scott, Seeing like a state, 3.

  48. Pérez Moreda, Las crisis, 299; Morales Padrón, Memorias de Sevilla, 67.

  49. Brockliss and Jones, The medical world, 350, quoting L'Érisse, Méthode excellente et fort familière pour guérir la peste (Vienne, 1628).

  50. Lebrun, Se soigner autrefois, 162–3 (see the identical pattern in Switzerland described by Eckert, ‘Boundary formation’); Moote, The Great Plague, 254.

  51. Marks, Tigers, 147 n. 42, reports a successful variolation campaign in 1657 near Guangzhou. On the more virulent strains from Africa, see Alden and Miller, ‘Unwanted cargoes’, and ch. 4 above. Ch. 5 above noted the ravages of smallpox among the Manchus.

  52. SCC, VI 6, 134–40 (Kangxi's personal testimony); Woods, Death before birth, 213–32 (smallpox, mothers and infants); Lee, Wang and Campbell, ‘Infant and child mortality’, 402–3 (spread of the technique in China). When describing variolation in Bengal in 1731, an English merchant claimed that the technique had been known there for 150 years: Guha, Health and population, 141.

  53. Schiebinger, Plants and empire, 100–4, notes the spread of variolation to Europe. The parish returns printed in Sinclair, The Statistical Account (see, for example, vol. II, 12 and 551), record how variolation had often eliminated smallpox in Scotland even before Jenner pioneered vaccination.

  54. No doubt Cromwell would have rejected any medicine monopolized by the Jesuits on ideological grounds, but his impeccably Catholic neighbour in the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Leopold William, also refused to use cinchona in the 1650s: Maehle, Drugs on trial, 226–8.

  55. ODNB s. v. Thomas Sydendam, letter to John Locke, 3 Aug. 1678.

  56. Li, Fighting famine, 167.

  57. Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires, 125 (writing of his personal inspection in the 1680s). Other details from Li, Fighting famine; Will and Wong, Nourish the people; Shiue, ‘Local granaries’; and Perdue, China marches West, 359–65. Early Tokugawa Japan, too, possessed a network of granaries: see ch. 16 above.

  58. Mikhail, Nature, 216–17. Ibrahim, Al-Azmat, ch. 4, argued that the famine of 1694–5 was the worst of the seventeenth century.

  59. Pullan, Rich and poor, 294–6, on Italian city granaries; Skippon, An account, 600; Hugon, Naples, 75, 139, 141, on Naples; and ch. 9 above on Madrid.

  60. For England, see Thirsk, The agrarian history, IV, 619, for Scotland, see http://www.rps.ac.uk, article proposed by Charles I on 1 Nov. 1625; for Sweden see Myllyntaus, ‘Summer frost’, 92–4 (the situation changed only after 1726 and yet another series of catastrophic harvests: over 100 parishes boasted granaries by the end of the eighteenth century).

  61. Ranum, Paris, 354–6. La Reynie, the first Lieutenant General (1667–97), belonged to the dévôt party that had long advocated spending on welfare, not warfare: see ch. 10.

  62. Guthrie, ‘A seventeenth-century “ever-normal granary”’; Farriss, Maya society, 269–70; and ch. 15 above.

  63. Romaniello, ‘Controlling the frontier’, 435; See Bercé, ‘Troubles frumentaires’, 489–93, on the repertory of emergency relief measures taken in 1648 by the magistrates of Fermo.

  64. Ailes, ‘Wars, widows’, 22, 25; Hastrup, Nature, 234–5; Anon., An ease for overseers of the poore, 22.

  65. Hindle, On the parish?, 256; Solar, ‘Poor relief’, 4–6; Blaug, ‘Poor Law Report’, 229.

  66. Allemeyer, ‘“Dass es wohl recht ein Feuer”’, 218–20, noting orders from Braunschweig, 1647; Emden, 1666; Kirchward, 1673; Clausthal, 1687; Nürnberg, 1698. See also the Epilogue below about the importance of ‘cumulative learning’, because humans only evolve coping strategies for disasters that are frequent as well as severe.

  67. Calculations from Thomas, Religion, 19–20; other data from Jones, Gazetteer, 52–3. See also ch. 3 above.

  68. Barbon, A letter, 1–2.

  69. McClain, Edo and Paris, 310–16; Needham and Wang, SCC, IV/ii, 218–22; van der Heyden, A description, 37, 81; Viallé and Blussé, The Deshima Registers, XII, 335–8.

  70. AUB Ms. 2538, ‘Triennial travels’, I/29.

  71. Israel, Dutch Republic, 680–2.

  72. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 85. He concluded his argument: ‘In the case of retail trade the competition that matters arises not from additional shops of the same type, but from the department store, the chain store, the mail-order house and the supermarket which are bound to destroy those pyramids sooner or later.’ Note the caveat concerning the use of the term ‘Creative Destruction’ on page 780 n. 8 above.

  73. Marcos Martín, España, 462–3, 479–82; McArdle, Altopascio, 52–4 and 91.

  74. Quotations from Sreenivasan, The peasants, 289–92, 322–3 and 326.

  75. Ogilvie, State corporatism, 106–9, 189 and 218–20; Sreenivasan, The peasants, 333–5, 345–8. See also Ogilvie, ‘Guilds’.

  76. Brokaw, Commerce, 226 and 405. For the size of the student market, see ch. 5 above.

  77. Ibid., 179 (and all of her ch. 5 on ‘Household division and competition’).

  78. Allen, ‘Wages’, passim. I thank Kenneth Pomeranz for discussing Allen's work with me.

  Chapter 22 The Great Divergence

  1. Adshead, ‘The XVIIth century General Crisis’ 265, 251; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, passim. Although The Great Divergence contains relatively little on science and technology, Pomeranz compared the experience of early modern Europe and China in this regard in ‘Without Coal? Colonies? Calculus?’. Once again, I thank Kenneth Pomeranz for sharing with me his erudition and his insights.

&n
bsp; 2. Batencour, L'instruction méthodique, 32–46, ‘De la justice du maistre’ (see p. 40 on the special wickedness of ‘les garçons uniques’). I cite the 400–page 1669 re-edition of the 1654 original: L'escole paroissiale ou la manière de bien instruire les enfans dans les petits escoles.

  3. Jolibert, L'enfance, 18, Plaidoyer before the Parlement of Paris, 25 Jan 1680; Mélanges, 7, Letter Patent of Louis XV, Sep. 1724, creating a charity school in Rouen.

  4. Le Cam, ‘Extirper la barbarie’, 412–13, and idem, ‘Die undeutlichen Grenzen’, 50–1, quoting Duke Augustus of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel's Schulordnung (1651) and Allgemeine Landes-Ordnung (1647), whose first two articles enjoined universal attendance at church and school – seen as the two pillars on which political stability rested.

  5. Act of the Scottish Parliament registered 2 Feb. 1646 (http://www.rps.ac.uk/trans/1645/11/185, accessed 8 Feb. 2012).

  6. Rawski, Education, 33–4 (on the 1652 schools edict) and 26 (citing an ‘encyclopaedia’ probably published in 1675–6); Herman, ‘Empire’ (on the 1658 edict on education for chieftains, the first of many). On China's ‘national school curriculum’, see chs 5 and 19 above.

  7. Dore, Education, 20. Nevertheless, given the existence of 236 fiefs, in this respect Japan lagged far behind China and much of Europe.

  8. Israel, Radical enlightenment, 128–9.

  9. Hautz, Geschichte der Universität Heidelberg, II, 186–8, report of the Rector and debate by the Senate, 25 Feb. and 5 Mar. 1680; Tukker, ‘The recruitment’, 212 n. 4. See also the data on falling enrolments at Spanish universities in Kagan, Students.

  10. Hugon, Naples, 266–7; Garrisson, ‘Les préludes’, 13, bishop of Montauban to Mazarin, 8 July 1659, a few days after students from the Protestant Academy had unwisely invaded the neighbouring Jesuit College and beaten up its students.

  11. Rutt, Diary of Thomas Burton, II, 531–42, prints Oliver Cromwell's Letters Patent of 15 May 1657 founding ‘a College at Durham’, naming its instructors (mostly associates and protégés of Samuel Hartlib), and funding it from local church property; Newcastle, Advice, 20, written in 1659 (see Cavendish, Life, 186).