The Afterlife of Global Crisis

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century represents a world history of a particular kind. It ranges widely across space, considering cases of famine, rebellion, warfare, and state breakdown drawn from China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Western Europe. Arguing that climate change and the catastrophes that largely resulted from it created not only a widespread perception of crisis but also stressed social and political institutions, Parker shows that these strains sparked upheavals of various kinds. In many places around the globe, death and suffering rose dramatically. Contemporaries wrote voluminously of their perplexity and worry over the transformation taking place. Political responses to catastrophe fell short in many areas, exacerbating the crisis and occasionally instigating uprisings or facilitating invasions. Places such as Tokugawa Japan that were left relatively unscathed by the spiraling disaster responded more effectively to the crisis. Such an argument hinges on the unifying explanatory tool of widespread climate change affecting various locations more or less simultaneously, requiring Parker first to document the presence of catastrophic natural conditions; second, to show their local effects; and, finally, to gauge responses (or lack thereof) to those often drastic problems. Broadly comparative in approach, Global Crisis moves across regions to evaluate impacts, reactions and responses to a set of broadly shared challenges. Climatic shifts arising from fewer sunspots and more volcanic eruptions changed weather and caused catastrophes, linking the regional histories addressed in this work.

The wide-ranging conversation explored a variety of issues of interest to scholars of world history. A set of comments opened a dialogue about whether and by whom world history can be written, a subject that could not be more relevant to the readers of the Journal of World History. A deeper discussion of scope and scale tapped into ongoing considerations of these key questions and serendipitously picked up on a theme explored in Kenneth Pomeranz’s presidential address at the same meeting.² A fruitful exchange around the issue of how to identify and conceptualize the nature of historical change rounded out the main elements of the conversation.

While the rhetorical query as to whether world history represents “a useful category of analysis” offered if not a seeming false start, at least a playful one, it in fact moved into a practical discussion about whether junior scholars can produce world history. Edmund “Terry” Burke III opened the conversation by questioning whether world history could be produced at all. Burke, the director of the Center for World History for the University of California, presumably believes that it can. His query launched a discussion at the heart of the concerns of JWH readers: how to produce world histories. Referencing the numerous research assistants Parker employed, one junior interlocutor followed with the suggestion that such a book—especially if it required deep pockets or a team of one’s own graduate students—would be out of the reach of a graduate student or junior scholar. Financial resources of course not only hire translators and scouts into the foreign archives but also support travel to distant research locations. In response to this query, Parker mentioned the need to master ever more languages, suggesting that a few additional decades in the life of a scholar would provide an opportunity to acquire additional skills. How often, one wonders, do scholars increase their access to archives through growing language expertise over time?³ In any case, with age comes an accretion of knowledge, particularly for those scholars who range widely beyond their original area of expertise.

Parker himself offers an example. A first book conventionally based on his excellent Cambridge doctoral dissertation in Spanish military history (“The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries Wars, 1567–1659,” 1972) paved the way for a series of broader books on Spanish history (particularly around the figure of Philip II) and on European military history more generally (most famously The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500–1800, 1988).⁴ Both placing a military transformation into the context...