The Genesis of Global Crisis

I remember as if it were yesterday the moment when I became interested in the Global Crisis of the seventeenth century. As an undergraduate, I had read the articles on the “General Crisis” by Eric Hobsbawm and Hugh Trevor-Roper, as well as sundry critiques of their views, published in the 1950s in the journal Past and Present.² Although they were breathtakingly erudite, I noted with surprise that none of the participants in the “debate” strayed beyond Europe. I did not realize the extent of this oversight until one evening in 1976 when I listened to an interview on BBC Radio with Jack Eddy, a solar physicist, who had just published a paper in Science on the “Maunder Minimum”: the period between 1645 and 1715 when virtually no sunspots appeared. Eddy emphasized that he presented “evidence of absence” and not just “absence of evidence”—astronomers used the powerful telescopes invented by Galileo to observe the sun on eight thousand days during the reign of Louis XIV (ironically called “the Sun King”), but in those seventy years they saw a grand total of scarcely one hundred sunspots, fewer than appeared in a single year of the twentieth century—and he speculated that the prolonged “sunspot minimum” contributed to an episode of global cooling that earth scientists had christened the Little Ice Age.

Eddy did not suggest that global cooling might have contributed to the General Crisis—his article did not mention the topic—but I found the connection so plausible and exciting that, together with a former student, Lesley Smith, I decided to edit some essays on the crisis that had appeared since Aston’s volume. We requested and received Eddy’s permission to include his essay in our collection, published in 1978. It was, I believe, the first application of solar physics to early modern history.³

Thereafter, the General Crisis “debate” languished until 1990, when William S. Atwell, a historian of Ming China, published in the journal Modern Asian Studies the papers delivered at a panel titled “The General Crisis in East Asia” at the annual meeting of the American Association for Asian Studies. In 1997 Lesley Smith and I included three of the essays, as well as one on Germany by another former student of mine, Sheilagh Ogilvie, in a new and expanded edition of The General Crisis.⁴

Shortly afterward, I realized that I had identified my next research project and in February 1998 I breathlessly e-mailed a friend with the news:

Last night I awoke at 4 AM and realized that I wanted to write a book about the General Crisis of the seventeenth century—not a collection of essays (been there, done that) but an integrated narrative and analytical account of the first global crisis for which we possess adequate documentation for Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. My account would adopt a Braudelian structure, examining long-term factors (climate above all), medium-run changes (economic fluctuations and so on) and “events” (from the English Civil War and the crisis in the French and Spanish Monarchies, through the murder of two Ottoman sultans, the civil wars in India and sub-Saharan Africa to the collapse of Ming China and the wars around the Great Lakes of North America) … [The book would examine] why such synchronic developments occur with so little warning and why they end. Since it addresses issues of concern today—the impact of global climatic change and sharp economic recession on government and society—it should not lack interested readers.⁵

I therefore prepared a book proposal, titled “The World Crisis 1635–1665,” which secured not only a contract and a hefty advance from Basic Books and Penguin Press, but also a Guggenheim fellowship that enabled me to start serious writing. I promised to deliver a complete typescript in 2003.

How could I have been so stupidly optimistic? First, it took me a while to realize just how Eurocentric I remained: The core chapters in my book proposal covered little more than Europe and China. What about Central and South Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas? Then...