In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker
  • Mary Lindemann
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. By Geoffrey Parker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. xxix + 871. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 978-0300153231.

This is almost as big as it gets, historically speaking. In a scholarly world often populated by Lilliputian studies based on thin documentation, the Global Crisis is a strapping Hercules of a book—powerful in conception and argument, sweeping in ambition, and elegant in expression. Few authors would have attempted such a study; even fewer could have brought it to fruition.

The Global Crisis presents a simple yet forceful argument about the character of the seventeenth century; it was marked, indelibly and catastrophically, by “the fatal synergy between natural and human disasters” (xxiii). Over the course of slightly more than 700 text pages, Parker connects the older idea of “the crisis of the seventeenth century” and newer work on environment and climatic change. Of course, even the original crisis literature mentioned poor harvests, bad weather, and natural disasters; but it is Parker’s accomplishment to make each of these themes integral to a globally occurring crisis. He refuses to accept that the term “general crisis” has “become synonymous with what historians in other centuries call history” (112). Without suggesting that such crises may never occur again—and indeed, that forms here an underlying cautionary tale—Parker views this crisis as historically unique.

Parker’s crisis is truly global. No place, or virtually none, remained untouched, although each experienced the crisis “in different ways, for different reasons, and with different outcomes” (xxv). The central core of the volume describes these synchronous anomalies, discusses their origins, and offers reasons why the crisis ended when it did. By the 1680s and 1690s, although the Little Ice Age continued, Parker maintains that the wave of upheavals and revolutions that plagued earlier decades had passed and what T.K. Rabb has called The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975) had been won or at least the succeeding generations never faced such all-encompassing challenges again. While one might dispute the point at which Parker dates the termination of the crisis—the last decade of the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth century were, after all, pockmarked by wars—his interpretation nonetheless successfully addresses the necessity of resolving a crisis; a crisis without a resolution is, after all, no crisis at all. [End Page 157]

The Global Crisis opens with the sobering observation that “climate change has almost extinguished life on earth on three occasions” (xv). The Little Ice Age, with colder but also wetter weather, had its most devastating impact from the 1640s to the 1690s. Human life was scythed by at least one-third. Part One, which discusses the “Placenta of the Crisis,” lucidly reviews the most recent literature on the Little Ice Age, delving into the scientific as well as the documentary evidence. The section on the General Crisis stresses the conditions of famine and poor nutrition, and it elucidates the demographic realities. Climate comes first in that discussion, yet Parker is not a climatic determinist. It is a terrible story; for virtually everyone, there was a “sharp deterioration in the overall quality of life” (668). Some places, like China, suffered the worst; others, like early Tokugawa Japan, came off relatively lightly. The reasons why are discussed at length in each section where the author weaves climatic and structural forces together with human actions. Human activities could mitigate or exacerbate the crisis but could not prevent it or halt it in its tracks. Tokugawa Japan’s experience illustrates this pattern succinctly. Like every place on the planet, the Japanese archipelago endured the ravages of the Little Ice Age. But a combination of under-population and the Pax Tokugawa insulated the Japanese from the worst effects. Parker notes that, with respect to surviving the crisis, sometimes “less is more” (505).

Parker’s analysis demonstrates the “synchronicity, the interdependence and the interactions of the various revolutions” (xxvi) by taking into account the role played by contingency. For Parker, nothing is ever quite inevitable. He prefers Malcolm...

pdf

Share