Review: Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker, currently a professor of history at Ohio State University, is a deeply impressive book. It avoids the defect of many books by academic historians — to miss the forest for the trees and argue that finding long term trends or similar processes in different eras is impossible — while simultaneously not falling into the trap of the kind of pop social science books that frequently end up on best seller lists and asserting a simple and universal chain of cause and effect. Readers of Adam Tooze's Chartbook will be familiar with the concept of a polycrisis — a series of multiple related crises that intertwine and play off each other. Just like we might identify COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, inflation, the rise in food and energy prices, and political unrest around the world as elements of the modern "polycrisis" Parker argues for a 17th century equivalent stretching from China, across Eurasia, to the farthest outposts of European empire in the Americas.
He begins his book by describing the mechanisms of this general crisis. Abnormal sunspot activity, El Niño, and volcanic eruptions drove down global temperatures, which in turn caused harvest failures, drought in some areas and torrential rain in others, and longer winters. Preindustrial farmers generally lived on the edge of subsistence, so these shocks were enough to push many into famine. Even when they didn't, they reduced tax revenues, forcing governments to squeeze their populations harder than they did before. States during this period fought constantly, and it was the era of the "military revolution" — the subject and title of another book by Parker — so they were constantly strapped for cash to pay for ever larger armies of mercenary soldiers with gunpowder weapons, who even in the best of times had to partially support themselves by pillaging local populations. Lacking modern bureaucracies, these states had to rely on unpopular royal "favorites" who held authority outside normal channels and military commanders cum entrepreneurs who raised armies on contract. Although it may have been possible to cut back on military expenditures by making peace, the fact that wars were often fought across religious lines made serious negotiation seem almost like heresy. The combination of less food, ceaseless war, higher taxes, and senior officials seen as illegitimate very often led to upheaval and revolution, with devastating consequences.
Parker then goes into short narratives — each about 50 pages on average — of individual states and regions during this period. For example, he describes how:
The Chinese Ming dynasty devolved into anarchy and banditry on a massive scale due to famine and ineffective governance. Some of these bandits coalesced into an army capable of seizing Beijing and destroying the central government, at which point Manchu invaders swept through China and established the Qing dynasty.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost Ukraine to a Cossack revolt. The rebels asked the Romanov Tsar to be their ruler instead, who suffered his own series of rebellions in Russia. Although destructive, these ended with the Tsars more powerful both internally and externally than before and laid the foundation for Russia to become a great power.
Protestant Bohemia rebelled against the Catholic Hapsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, beginning the Thirty Years War. Although the rebellion was essentially crushed fairly quickly, it sparked foreign intervention by Denmark, France, and Sweden, motivated by the desire to protect their coreligionists (in the case of Denmark and Sweden) but above all to check Hapsburg power. The war dragged on, back and forth, for a generation.
The Spanish Empire, ruled by another branch of the Hapsburgs, intervened in the Thirty Years War, continued its struggle to control the rebellious Netherlands that stretched back into the 16th century, and fought on and off wars with France and England. Struggling to maintain the military forces necessary for this multifront war effort and unwilling to make peace in order to focus on its most important threats, the Spanish crown attempted to squeeze as much men and revenue out of its people as possible. This set off rebellions in Andalusia, Catalonia, and Portugal, the latter successfully declaring independence which it has maintained up to today.
Britain's King Charles I provoked a rebellion in Scotland by attempting to force religious reform on the staunchly Calvinist kingdom, and his efforts to pay for his unsuccessful suppression of the revolt, along with his “popish” religious beliefs, made England's Parliament turn on him as well. He was ultimately defeated and executed by Parliamentary forces, who went on to brutally suppress uprisings Ireland and Scotland and establish a republic turned military dictatorship, which was itself overthrown with the restoration of Charles' son, Charles II, to the throne.
These are only a few examples; the book also goes through events in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, France, Japan, and the British colonies in the New World, among others. Throughout, he effectively weaves together data and excerpts from primary sources to paint a picture of the devastation wrought by these events. Ireland's population fell by 20%, those of Poland, Russia, China, and the Ottoman Empire by 33%, and that of Germany by perhaps 40%. Some of this decline was migration out of conflict zones, but most of it was simple death, and Parker does not allow his statistics to obscure the human misery behind them. His readers get to hear the stories of ordinary people like Wei Qinniang, a Chinese woman who was separated from her husband during the sack of her hometown and wrote on the wall of a temple: "I swallowed my sobs and wept in secret, fearing that others might find me . . . I look at my shadow and pity myself" before killing herself; and of Peter Hagendorf, a soldier who, while campaigning around Germany from 1624-1648 lost all four of his children and his wife before remarrying and having six more, of whom only two survived to the end of the war. Parker, in characteristic fashion, uses this last personal tragedy to illustrate the high rates of mortality among soldiers and their families during this period.
Are there modern lessons to be pulled from this book? A few are obvious. Small shifts in climate can have large consequences. Foreign policy must be based on prudence and realism, and cannot be overtaken by ideology. Attempts to squeeze resources out of people during hard times will produce a backlash. Above all, however, the book reminds us to avoid the twin errors cited above — that of seeing all events as essentially random and without patterns on the one hand, and that of drawing simplistic chains of cause and effect, with no room for contingency, on the other. The general crisis of the 17th century bounced between global cooling, religious divides, changes in military organization, domestic and foreign conflict, and the decisions of individual statesmen like a ricocheting bullet, with each influencing the others. We must remember that the crises of our own time do the same.