Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Dress like people from abroad, such as the Hollanders, the people from Keiling, the Biadju, the Makassarese, the Buginese. Let no one follow any of the Malay dressing customs. If foreign dressing-customs are followed this will unavoidably bring misery over the country where this is done … [There will be] disease, much intrigue and food will become expensive because people dress like those in foreign countries.72

  Most spectacular of all, in China, the Qing insisted that all their male subjects shave their forelocks, braid the rest of their hair in a pigtail, and adopt Manchu dress, on pain of death. Initially, the head-shaving edict made sense because it immediately distinguished friend from foe: the long hair of Ming loyalists could be shorn in a few minutes. Shaving the forelocks therefore seemed a perfect test of loyalty; but it also created constant provocation because compliance required constant repetition as each man's hair grew. Nevertheless the Qing refused to back down and instead decreed ‘Keep your head, lose your hair; keep your hair, lose your head’ (chapter 5 below).

  Not one of these contentious issues – wearing a veil at the ‘churching of women’, smoking tobacco, dressing like Dutchmen, head-shaving and so on – threatened the integrity or security of the state; and not one of them arose from the problems created by the Little Ice Age. With goodwill, statesmanship, or just the ‘willingness to wink’, each of them could have been peacefully resolved; but the exalted rhetoric and claims of those leaders who believed in the Divine Right of Kings or the Mandate of Heaven prevented such an outcome. On the contrary, they produced crises out of trifles and exacerbated tensions created by more serious problems, thereby increasing the sum of human misery.

  Untangling the connections between these distinctive and disruptive aspects of seventeenth-century government (Divine Right, Tanistry, Composite States, Favourites and Absolutism), and the increased frequency of war and rebellion, is nevertheless complicated by two factors: contingency and feedback loops. Thus, a well-informed English minister later believed that the Anglo-Dutch war that began in 1664 ‘arose by strange accidental things concurring from several parts and parties without any intent to help each other’.73 Documenting feedback loops is more difficult, but the success of Favourites in removing checks and balances made it easier for monarchs to go to war; while war made Favourites more necessary, because monarchs needed to curtail checks and balances in order to extract more resources. A similar feedback loop existed between war and rebellion. On the one hand, interstate war frequently caused intrastate rebellions by driving governments to extract resources from their subjects more aggressively. On the other hand, intrastate rebellions could turn into interstate wars when alienated subjects secured foreign intervention. It is therefore impossible to assert that one aspect was always the cause while the other was always the effect: the relationship between them varied according to time and place.

  Nevertheless, one part of the feedback loop remained constant: war seemed uniquely capable of uniting opponents of a regime. The imperative to ‘feed Mars’ eventually led governments to impose burdens on every social group and all geographical regions, which often alienated everyone at the same time. To be sure, the heaviest burdens normally fell on the lower ranks of each state, but governments desperate to win a war also trampled on the rights of those with corporate rights such as cities, nobles and clergy in their efforts to extract resources, and upon certain regions that the Little Ice Age rendered particularly vulnerable.

  3

  ‘Hunger is the greatest enemy’: The Heart of the Crisis

  IN ONE OF HIS CELEBRATED ESSAYS, PUBLISHED EARLY IN THE SEVENTEENTH century, the English politician and philosopher Francis Bacon warned rulers to ensure that their subjects, unless ‘mowen downe by wars, doe not exceed the stock of the kingdome that should maintain them’, because a prolonged imbalance between the production and consumption of food sooner or later produces famine, disruption and revolt.1

  Subsequent writers agreed. In 1640 a historian ‘embedded’ with the army of Philip IV as it passed through the drought-parched fields of Catalonia noted ominously: ‘Amid the distress to which human misery reduces us, there is almost nothing men would not do’. Seven years later, the minister responsible for law and order in Castile warned his master that ‘The population [of Madrid] is very volatile and every day becomes more insolent … because hunger respects no one [la ambre a ninguno respecta]. The people are so licentious that no day is safe’ from the threat of violence. In case Philip missed the point, other ministers reminded him that ‘Hunger is the greatest enemy. Even the most frugal person cannot cope with it … and in many states the shortage of bread has provoked unrest that ended in sedition’. In 1648, as several Italian towns faced the worst harvest of the century, officials reported ‘murmurs among the people saying that “it was always better to die by the sword than to die of hunger”’; while in London ‘the cryes and teares of the poore, who professe they are almost ready to famish’ led some to fear that ‘a sudden confusion would follow’. Finally in Scotland, during the last famine of the century, an acute observer reminded his compatriots that ‘Poverty and want emasculate the mindes of many, and make those who are of dull natures, stupid and indisciplinable’, whereas ‘those that are of a firy and active temperament, it maketh them unquiet, rapacious, frantick or desperate. Thus, where there are many poor, the rich cannot be secure in the possession of what they have.‘2

  Nevertheless, although the Little Ice Age afflicted almost the entire northern hemisphere, some areas suffered more than others. This should cause no surprise. Europe west of the Urals covers four million square miles, ranging from arctic to subtropical and containing hundreds of ethnic, cultural, economic and political divisions: naturally, developments did not take place uniformly in all regions. Even within Spain, different areas suffered at different times. Galicia in the northwest and Valencia in the southeast experienced population decline from about 1615 to the 1640s; but in the centre, although the decline around Toledo also began in 1615, it lasted until the 1670s, while around Segovia, where the decline also ended in the 1670s, it began only after 1625. Ming China, covering 1.5 million square miles, and also ranging from subarctic to tropical conditions, likewise experienced the Little Ice Age in many different ways. Thus low-lying Shandong in the northeast often experiences both droughts and floods, so that the province rarely generates a surplus – let alone a reserve on which to draw in bad years. Urgent petitions calling for food loans and tax relief therefore emanated from Shandong on an almost annual basis, in the seventeenth century as at other times. By contrast Sichuan province in the west enjoys a mild climate which in most years permits abundant crops of rice, wheat, cotton, sugar, silk and tea – thus reducing vulnerability to global cooling.

  Amid the diversity, three broad economic ‘zones’ stand out as particularly exposed to climate change: marginal farming lands; cities; and macro-regions. Marginal lands were vulnerable because they produced enough to feed all their inhabitants only during years of optimal harvests. Cities, by contrast, were vulnerable because their prosperity made them strategic targets, which in turn led to the construction of a fortified perimeter that promoted overcrowding, poor hygiene and the spread of diseases inside the walls and, in wartime, exposed the inhabitants to the risk of extensive human and material damage. Finally ‘macro-regions’ – complex regional economies consisting of several adjacent towns and their overlapping hinterlands – were vulnerable because their prosperity rested on the ability to import the food on which their population depended and to export the specialized goods which they produced. Disruption of either activity, whether at home or abroad, caused almost immediate hardship.

  Although the inhabitants of these three economic ‘zones’ formed a small minority of the global population, they featured disproportionately in the Global Crisis. On the one hand, they suffered earlier, longer and more intensely than others, because government policies exacerbated to a unique degree the disruption created by climatic adversity and overpop
ulation; on the other hand, they harboured a large number of articulate men and women eager to publicize their predicament at home and, whenever they could, abroad. These voices resonated longer and louder than those of others whose experiences may have been more typical.

  Agriculture on the Margin

  For most of the sixteenth century, warmer weather permitted the expansion of farming throughout the northern hemisphere and a good part of this process took place on lands already close to the limits of viable cultivation. The farmers who cultivated these lands initially reaped spectacular harvests, thanks to the nitrogen and phosphorus that had accumulated in the earth during the centuries when they lay fallow; but once this natural bounty expired, even in ‘good’ years they became trapped in a high-risk, high-input, low-yield operation that required constant attention to produce even a mediocre crop. In northerly latitudes, as noted in chapter 1, each fall of 0.5°C in the mean summer temperature decreases the number of days on which crops ripen by 10 per cent, doubles the risk of a single harvest failure, and increases the risk of a double failure sixfold. Moreover, for those farming 1,000 feet or more above sea level, a fall of 0.5°C in the mean summer temperature increases the chance of two consecutive failures a hundredfold.

  This cruel calculus applies throughout the northern hemisphere. In Scotland, where the majority of all farmland is marginal, the benign climate of the sixteenth century encouraged the cultivation of fields at higher altitudes and on poorer soils than before, but the cold and wet summers of the 1640s, which drove down mean temperatures by up to 2°C, brought disaster. In the Lammermuir Hills near the English border, three-quarters of the farms were abandoned; while on the Mull of Kintyre, in the west, four-fifths of all townships were abandoned because ‘Farmers were not able to plant nor crofters to dig. The corn when it came up did not ripen … People and cattle died, and Kintyre became almost a desert‘3 (Fig. 5). In southern Europe, Sicily saw the foundation of some 70 ‘new towns’ in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, specifically to produce grain for the fast-growing cities of the island. At first many farmers harvested up to ten grains for each grain of wheat sown, and more than ten for each grain of barley sown, but the extreme weather of the 1640s drove yield ratios down on some lands of the new towns to 1:2 – a reduction of 80 per cent, and the lowest recorded in the entire early modern period. Leonforte, one of those new towns, grew from zero to over 2,000 inhabitants between 1610 and 1640, but the drought of 1648, which produced the poorest harvest ever recorded, brought catastrophe. The town's parish register recorded 426 burials but only 60 births.4

  5. Farms in south-east Scotland abandoned in the seventeenth century.

  Fourteen of the fifteen farmsteads that existed in the Lammermuir hills (south-east Scotland) in 1600 had disappeared by 1750, and three-quarters of the cultivated land reverted to permanent moorland. Global cooling, which increased the number of failed harvests, bears part of the blame, but the troops crossing between Scotland and England during the Civil War between 1639 and 1660 also contributed to the general insecurity of the region.

  Clearing fields for cultivation led to a pernicious practice that could soon make even the most fertile land marginal: clear-cutting forests. A historian living in Shaanxi province in northwest China recalled that ‘flourishing woods’ used to cover its hills so that rainfall flowed down in gentle streams, and villagers cut ‘canals and ditches which irrigated several thousand [acres] of land’. But as prosperity in the region grew,

  People vied with each other in building houses, and wood was cut from the southern mountains without a year's rest. Presently people took advantage of the barren mountain surface and converted it into farms. Small bushes and seedlings in every square foot of ground were uprooted. The result was that if the heavens send down torrential rain, there is nothing to obstruct the flow of water. In the morning it falls on the southern mountains; in the evening, when it reaches the plains, its angry waves swell in volume and break through the embankments, frequently changing the course of the river.5

  New and old farms alike ceased to be viable.

  The ‘urban graveyard effect’

  Although the decision to give up a farm – for whatever reason – is always heart-wrenching, the Little Ice Age forced many farmers on marginal lands to flee to the towns with their families in the hope of finding work or at least bread. Most of them met with bitter disappointment, in part because their flight helped to fuel unsustainable urban expansion.

  The mid-seventeenth century was a ‘metropolitan moment’: never before had so many people lived in such close proximity. Beijing, the largest city in the world, had in excess of one million inhabitants, with almost as many in Nanjing. Six other Chinese cities numbered 500,000 citizens or more, while a score had 100,000 or more. Mughal India, the most urbanized area in the world after China, included three cities with 400,000 or more inhabitants and another nine with over 100,000. By 1650, 2.5 million Japanese, perhaps 10 per cent of the total population, lived in towns. By contrast, in the Americas, only Mexico and Potosí (the silver-mining centre of Peru) exceeded 100,000 inhabitants; while Africa's only metropolis was Cairo, with perhaps 400,000 residents. In Europe, the population of Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire, may have approached 800,000, but no other city came close: only London, Naples and Paris exceeded 300,000. Ten other European cities numbered 100,000 inhabitants or more, while in Holland over 200,000 people lived in ten towns within a 50-mile radius of Amsterdam.

  Every one of these metropolitan areas required prodigious quantities of housing, fuel, food and fresh water, as well as schemes to manage traffic, fight fires and keep public spaces clean. Failure to provide these essential services created the ‘urban graveyard effect’. In the 1630s William Ince, a Dublin preacher, delivered a sermon that poured scorn on the desire of Abraham's brother Lot (in the Book of Genesis) to flee from Sodom to another city, where he hoped to find ‘plentie, societie, and safetie’, believing that in a ‘Citie all these three concurre to make life securely happy’, whereas, in fact, Ince reminded his audience, Lot found that urban living brought only ‘povertie and solitarienesse’. And, indeed, as the French social historian Jean Jacquart observed, all early modern cities were ‘a mouroir, a demographic black hole, accounting for disproportionately fewer marriages, fewer births and more deaths’. In London, which preserves particularly precise demographic records, burials in the seventeenth century were often twice as numerous as baptisms and both maternal and infant mortality were particularly high. Only massive immigration from other communities prevented major cities from shrinking in size, which meant that each capital exerted a pronounced ‘dampening’ effect on the population of the kingdom as a whole6 (Fig. 6). As early as 1616, King James I predicted with alarm that ‘all the country is gotten into London, so as, with time, England will only be London, and the whole country be left waste with everyone living miserably in our houses, and dwelling all in the city’.7

  6. The ‘dampening effect’ of London on England's overall demographic growth.

  Although other areas of England registered a surplus of some 120,000 births over deaths between 1650 and 1674, London accrued a deficit of 228,000 over the same period and only strong immigration allowed the capital to keep growing.

  One of King James's subjects, Ben Jonson, published a satirical poem about the ‘urban graveyard effect’ created by the shortage of shelter, food and water, as seen through the eyes of a brave trio who travelled through the sewers of London, where

  Hung Stench, Diseases, and old Filth, their Mother,

  With Famine, Wants, and Sorrows many a Dozen,

  The least of which was to the Plague a Cozen.

  But they unfrighted pass, tho’ many a Privy

  Spake to them louder than the Ox in Livy.

  According to Jonson's contemporary James Howell, Paris was no better: it ‘is alwayes dirty, and ‘tis such a dirt, that by perpetual motion is beaten into such black onctious oyl, that wher it sticks
no art can wash it off’. In addition, ‘besides the stain this dirt leaves, it gives also so a strong scent, that it may be smelt many miles off, if the wind be in one's face as he comes from the fresh air of the countrey. This may be one cause why the plague is alwayes in som corner or other of this vast citie, which may be call'd, as once Scythia was, Vagina populorum’. Another contemporary, Xie Zhaozhe, made much the same complaints about Beijing:

  The houses in the capital are so closely crowded together that there is no spare space, and in the markets there is much excrement and filth. People from all directions live together in disorderly confusion, and there are many flies and gnats. Whenever it becomes hot it is almost intolerable. A little steady rain has only to fall and there is trouble from flooding. Therefore malarial fevers, diarrhoea and epidemics follow each other without stopping.8

  Of course, city-dwellers at virtually all times and in virtually all places have made similar complaints; but in the mid-seventeenth century the problems they faced intensified. For example, by the 1630s population and building densities in the City of London both reached levels that ‘have probably not been witnessed in Britain either before or since’. In some parishes, almost 400 persons squeezed into each acre, many of them living in six-storey houses, in one case with ‘six rooms let to sixty-four persons’ (an average of 11 per room). At least 30 per cent of London households lived at or below the poverty line.9

  In many seventeenth-century cities, growing dependence on fossil fuels created new problems. Any disruption in supply soon produced general misery. Beijing welcomed the Manchu invaders in 1644 in part because they promised to restore the supply of coal from Shanxi on which householders and industrialists alike depended, disrupted for two years by civil war. Likewise, when that same year military operations interrupted the supply of Tyneside coal required by London's industries, an observer predicted ‘there will be riots this winter’. However, fossil fuels damaged the health of city-dwellers through pollution. In 1656 the English poet Sir William Davenant published an ‘entertainment’ that complained that in London ‘the plentiful exercise of your chimneys makes up that canopy of smoke which covers your city’ and included a song that began: