Why This Time?: Contexts for Creative Destruction

As my colleagues have affirmed, along with a host of reviewers, the book we have gathered to appreciate is a towering achievement of erudition, scholarship, graceful style, and wisdom. Beyond the general praise, for an Africanist its ambitious embrace of the world’s regions is also forward looking, extending even to what Geoffrey Parker calls “the dark continents”—bracketing the phrase with inverted commas to disclaim its potentially loaded overtones. I take his marking as a wry acknowledgement of the relative lack of historical evidence illuminating the seventeenth century in Australia, the Americas, and Africa (my own area of expertise). It may also speak to the issue of finding an analytically substantive characterization of the areas of world beyond the charmed circle of Eurasian militarized imperial systems that the “Big Chill” of the seventeenth century threw into famine, wars, depopulation, and other aspects of the crisis at the core of the book.

I accent “forward-looking” from the perspective of the (Africanist) “dark side” because Parker’s inclusiveness furthers a profound, and more than welcome, globalizing turn in the modern discipline of history, one of epistemological proportions. The reviews—mostly in terms of the book’s background in the considerable literature on the crisis in Europe—note Parker’s global vision but do not accent the significance that I see in it.¹ More than a century and a half ago the modern discipline of history was invented resolutely within the framework of the then formative militarized Western nation-state. Its strongly progressive tones set the West off from the Rest. But in Global Crisis the Rest—or at least a manageably representative selection of them—are restored, including (principally) China, Russia, the Ottomans, the Mughals, Japan, and the Safavids, even letting Europe wait its proper turn by sequencing the opening regional chapters from east to west. All this breadth is developed from an awe-inspiring tour de force of primary research, thus to accord appropriate respect to the particular historical contexts of each. In chapter after chapter Parker summons the players to speak for themselves, as well as assembling reports of foreign observers. I anticipate that the hallmark of the future discipline will be its appreciation of the unique ways of the many historical worlds of the past, arrayed in their full diversity. That a single individual, so accomplished within the conventional western European framework, chose to range out beyond it so inclusively is visionary.

A final appreciation, specific to this comment: Another strength of the book is its careful attention to contexts of historical time as well as of place. Though the sequencing of Parker’s subtitle, “War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe,” could be read as linking the “war and catastrophe” integrally (even mechanistically) to “climate,” he is at pains from the start (p. xix) not to consign human history to climatic determinism but rather to emphasize historical “adaptive strategies” and to depict the crisis not as a relentless meshing of gears but rather as a conjunctural moment, a passing convergence, between about 1620 and the 1680s, of what he calls a “fatal synergy of human and natural factors” (p. 685 et passim). As he stresses, the measurably colder conditions of the “Little Ice Age” lingered on beyond the 1680s, even peaking (or wallowing) in intensity in the 1690s, while the wars and revolutions of the preceding era of “global crisis” then diminished in frequency. Apparently the survivors at the end of the seventeenth century, at least in Europe, no longer experienced as critical the climate conditions that two generations earlier had provoked demographic and political crises. Timing seems to have mattered. I will return to this point shortly.

The several perspectives in the panel and the general discussion that followed relieve any of us from having to attempt to elevate our individual comments to the level of Parker’s intricacy of argument and comprehensiveness of coverage. So, as I move to specifics, I’ll reduce the many reflections Parker has inspired for me to three, converging on his concluding accent on the (now) long-running historical campaign to rescue the...