After the Crisis: The Politics of a Global Pivot

It is an honor to comment on Global Crisis. As an admirer of Geoffrey Parker’s scholarship and as someone who follows and contributes to world history as a research field, I am pleased to have the opportunity to engage in a conversation at the American Historical Association about a book that is an erudite and important contribution to world history. Contemplating the role of climate in world history is a pleasure for another reason, too. I am the daughter of two members of the first generation of climate scientists in the United States. My father was among the first half-dozen U.S. climate scientists and was involved throughout his career in developing U.S. weather policy, and my mother was also trained as a meteorologist during and after World War II. Dinner table conversations in my house often took up the relation of weather and climate to national and global political trends.

Global Crisis weaves these topics together in an original analysis of world historical change. The book provides an exhaustive model of one approach to writing world history—the study of synchronic patterns, their origins, and effects—and focuses relentlessly on one composite global force: climate change and natural disasters. The reader almost feels a cold wind blowing while contemplating hundreds of vivid descriptions of frigid weather and considering its chilling effects on every aspect of social, economic, and political life in the seventeenth century.

My comments will focus not on climate adversity, but on the place of politics and institutional change in the long seventeenth century. Exhaustive as it is, the book leaves more to be said about the degree to which political change and climate interacted in producing turning points, and it raises unanswered questions about the nature of global systemic shifts. Certainly one of the great achievements of the book is its documentation of the intersection between climatic adversity and rebellions around the globe in the period. Parker identifies a series of peaks in political upheaval: between 1639 and 1642 in Normandy, Catalonia, the Portuguese Empire, New Spain, Andalusia, Ireland, and England; and in 1647 and 1648 in Naples and Sicily, France, England (again), Scotland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire (Parker, 676). What does climate adversity have to do with these waves of political upheaval? What were the global effects of these clusters of conflicts?

The book notes the evidence of shockingly low temperatures in intensifying rebellions—mainly by affecting harvests and creating or exacerbating shortages. In general, Parker is careful not to overstate the case for causal links. He sifts through and assesses the evidence for the impact of climate adversity in each political setting. At the same time, he collects an iceberg’s volume of commentary on the weather, as contemporaries remarked, often with amazement and awe, on the outsized natural disasters and brutal winter freezes.

One of the things we know about climate change from our own time is that people may recognize unusual weather events and even speculate about trends, but they do not often conclude that the trends will be long lasting. In contrast, political upheaval in general, and rebellions in particular, have historically been more closely and immediately connected to anxieties about systemic instabilities. My own sense of the story that Parker is telling is that the global crisis of the century, though in part prompted and at times exacerbated by climate adversity, is best understood as a crisis of order in the century’s middle decades. The institutional and political aftermath of the crisis then figured as a phase of global transformation that did not merely carry forward the same volatile mix of “war, climate, and catastrophe” but altered in fundamental ways the framework for conflict in the eighteenth century.

Parker dissects disorder, wars, and rebellions across all world regions—except Antarctica, where the penguins were quiet, and Japan, where unusual institutional arrangements anchored stasis. Besides relating political upheaval to climate adversity, Parker offers as his key framing device the idea of a “tipping point.” In doing so, he cites Malcolm Gladwell, who proposed the label “tipping point” in...