Global Crisis
Page 16
10. The social structure of Navalmoral, Spain, in the early seventeenth century.
Of 243 families living in a remote upland village south of Toledo, 11 families owned one-third of the village's land, 22 families owned half of it, and 108 families owned all of it. The rest of the inhabitants were ‘have-nots’, many of them homeless.
The lot of the have-nots was little better elsewhere. Even in England, the only European state that boasted an obligatory welfare system (the Poor Law), a failed harvest would double, triple or even quadruple the amount required from the rich to save the poor from starvation so that, in the words of social historian Steve Hindle, it is ‘difficult to understand how the agricultural labourer and his family got through the year’ in the mid-seventeenth century. Paid farm work was no longer ‘a living in itself, but simply a vital cash supplement to a subsistence based on the cultivation of cottage gardens and the exploitation of common rights’, occasionally augmented by poor relief; and this precarious situation ‘rendered imperative the participation of all family members in the production endeavours of the household economy’. Unless prevented by disability or weakness, until the later seventeenth century most ordinary English men and women started to earn their living at age six or seven and ‘literally worked themselves to death’.46
The situation of ‘ordinary men and women’ was, of course, even worse in war zones. In the Maas valley of the South Netherlands, the magistrates of St Truiden cancelled their annual fair in 1630 on account of ‘these times of war, of shortage of grain, of contagious disease, and of misery’. Four years later the parish priest at neighbouring Emael wrote in his diary: ‘This year, we have been tested in astonishing fashion by sickness, war, famine and fire. First a violent plague struck the village during the months of June and July, taking seventeen victims. Immediately afterwards, war unexpectedly came to us’ when three Spanish regiments (that is, troops sent to defend them) ‘lodged here. They behaved worse than barbarously: they destroyed everything; they cut trees, completely demolished many houses, and trampled whatever grain they could not steal, not even leaving enough to appease the hunger of the poor farmers. For that reason, we did not collect the tithe this year.’ Although none of these individual disasters was unprecedented, they had rarely if ever coincided: throughout the Maasland, in 1634 tithe receipts (which mirrored agricultural production and, as in Spain, provided the principal form of relief for the poor) sank to the lowest level ever recorded between 1620 and 1750.47
In China, too, agricultural production fell to its lowest levels in the mid-seventeenth century and, once again, brought about the collapse of traditional forms of charity. Each county town maintained (at least in theory) a state-run ‘Ever Normal’ granary, with smaller additional repositories elsewhere to ‘nourish the people'; but by the seventeenth century many lay empty, either through corruption or incompetence. In an attempt to avert disaster, groups of concerned citizens therefore created ‘voluntary societies for sharing goodness’. Some distributed aid to impoverished widows, padded winter jackets to the poor, and coffins in which to bury unclaimed corpses; others set up soup kitchens and advanced money to small businesses in trouble; others still established orphanages, medical dispensaries and schools for the poor. Most voluntary societies, however, only provided assistance to a select few. Some conducted a ‘background check’ before issuing approved supplicants with a ‘Ration Card'; others helped only those recommended by members (including their own relatives, in order to escape responsibility for maintaining them). Private charity therefore only scratched the surface of poverty. In 1641, on the eve of the great famine, the founder of a benevolent society in Zhejiang province claimed that although it now helped ‘three to four hundred people’ (compared with only a few dozen a decade before), he feared that ‘the number of persons who are kept alive or given burials is still less than 10 to 20 per cent’ of the total poor.48
Even this limited charity often ceased during the Ming-Qing transition. In Tancheng county (Shandong), the local elite informed a newly arrived magistrate in 1670 that the area ‘has long been destitute and ravaged. For thirty years now fields have lain under flood water or weeds.’ Famine, disease and bandits had depopulated the county in the 1630s; the Manchu army ravaged the county and sacked its capital in 1642; torrential rain caused the local rivers to flood, destroying the harvest, four times between 1649 and 1659. The county's assessment for forced labour therefore fell from just over 40,000 able-bodied males in the 1630s to under 33,000 in 1643 and to under 10,000 in 1646. By 1670, the new magistrate learned, ‘many people held their lives to be of no value, for the area was so wasted and barren, the common people so poor and had suffered so much, that essentially they knew none of the joys of being alive’.49
The people of Shandong were not alone in believing that they had faced horrors of unprecedented severity. Others, especially those living on marginal lands, in towns, or in macro-regions, wrote similar laments. Enomoto Yazaemon, a Japanese official who lived near Edo, thought that ‘the world was in flames from the time I was 15 [1638] to the time I was 18’. In Europe, a German cloth merchant lamented that ‘there have been so many deaths that the like of it has never been heard in human history'; while a chronicler in Burgundy saw ‘everywhere the face of death’ when war, plague and harvest failure struck simultaneously. ‘We lived from grass taken from the gardens and the fields,’ he wrote. ‘Posterity would never believe it.’ A German pastor expressed the same resignation: ‘Our descendants will never believe what miseries we have suffered'; while one of his Catholic clerical colleagues asked rhetorically: ‘Who could have described so many vile knaves, with all their evil tricks and wicked villainies? … I would not have had time or opportunity, nor could I have laid hands on enough pens, ink or paper.‘50 The incredulity and pessimism of these writers become explicable only when we look more closely at the scale of the demographic catastrophe which they had witnessed – a catastrophe that may have reduced the size of the global population by one-third.
4
‘A third of the world has died’: Surviving in the Seventeenth Century1
THE DRAMATIC REDUCTION IN FOOD SUPPLY IN THE MID-SEVENTEENTH century, whether through human or natural agency, forced many human communities to take urgent and extreme measures to reduce their food consumption. The easiest and most effective way to do this was to reduce the number of mouths to feed; and although this process took different forms in different parts of the globe, almost everywhere the population fell steadily from the 1620s until a new equilibrium emerged between supply and demand for basic resources – often not until the 1680s.
The exact scale of demographic contraction is hard to document. In 1654 the abbess of the convent of Port-Royal near Paris lamented that ‘a third of the world has died’, while, a generation later, the Chinese emperor asserted that during the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasties ‘over half of China's population perished’. Many surviving statistical data support such claims. Thus the parish registers from Île-de-France, where Port-Royal stood, show that ‘almost one quarter of the population vanished in a single year’. In China, tentative reconstruction of population levels in Tangcheng county in Jiangnan between 1631 and 1645 shows that some areas suffered almost 60 per cent losses.2 The number of taxable households in western Poland also fell by more than 50 per cent between the census of 1629 and that of 1661 while, further east, tax registers in what is now Belarus showed falls of between 40 and 95 per cent in urban populations between 1648 and 1667 (see chapter 6 below). In Germany, parts of Pomerania and Mecklenburg in the north, like parts of Hessen and the Palatinate in the centre, apparently lost two-thirds of their population between 1618 and 1648. Württemberg, in the southwest, boasted a population of 450,000 in 1618 but only 100,000 in 1639.
Even when detailed demographic records chart a decline, they do not always reveal the exact causes. Thus London's ‘Bills of Mortality’, which printed the weekly totals of burials in each parish of the capital to
gether with the causes of death, included such esoteric afflictions as ‘blasted’, ‘frighted’ and ‘headmouldshot’ as well as different types of homicide (‘murthered and shot’), recognizable diseases (‘smallpox’, ‘French pox’) and conditions (‘childbed’), as well as suicide (‘Hang'd and made away themselves’: Plate 25). Taken together, the ‘Bills’ and other available data nevertheless reveal three distinct mechanisms that reduced the global population during the seventeenth century:
• More deaths through suicide, disease, or war;
• Fewer births, either through postponing or preventing marriage, or through infanticide and child abandonment;
• More migration.
I. Death: ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls‘3
Suicide
An unprecedented number of people in the mid-seventeenth century appear to have reacted to adversity by killing themselves. During a famine in Scotland in the 1630s, some clerics reviewed the grim alternatives that faced their parishioners: ‘The picture of death is seen in the faces of many. Some devour the seaware [kelp and seaweed]; some eat dogs … Many are reduced to that extremity that they are forced to steal and thereafter are executed; and some have desperately run into the sea and drowned themselves.’ At much the same time, a Catholic at the court of Charles I gloated over an epidemic of suicides among Protestant clergymen: ‘a divine (and, they say, an excellent preacher)’ had ‘strangled himself with a garter, and the like did another minister lately in Manchester'; ‘a third minister … fell upon his owne sword’, while Dr Henry Butts, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, ‘on Easter daye in the morning hanged himself’. In 1637 the preface to a comprehensive English treatise on suicide (326 pages plus index) asserted that ‘scarce an age since the beginning of the world has afforded more examples’ of people who ‘drowned themselves’ or committed suicide in other ways. ‘There are many more self-murderers than the world takes notice of,’ it announced. ‘Yea, the world is full of them.‘4
In England, suicide was not only a felony, and so came before the courts, but also the subject of ‘shaming’ rituals such as dragging the corpse through the streets and (at least in some counties) burial in unconsecrated ground with a stake through the heart. So many mid-seventeenth-century records have disappeared that it is almost impossible to document fluctuations, but the surviving evidence suggests that twice as many English men as women took their own lives; that almost one-third of them were under 20 years old; and that about one-fifth were over 60. Although we can only guess at their motives, the court testimony of witnesses, as well as accounts by those who attempted to kill themselves but failed, suggest two broad categories. Some felt overwhelmed by a direct threat to their psychological or physical survival, such as bereavement, family strife and fear. Thus several mothers and a few fathers killed themselves after their children died; a 9-year-old boy tried to drown himself because he no longer wanted to live in poverty and misery; a young woman took her own life because she could not marry the man she loved; and a 12-year-old apprentice hanged himself when, after running away from a brutal master, his parents sent him back. A second group of unfortunates killed themselves because they had lost their social standing and could not live with the shame, such as women who became pregnant outside wedlock (especially as the result of incest or rape); and those who had suffered a public humiliation, such as a clerk who shot himself in prison after his arrest for debt.5 Meanwhile, in seventeenth-century Scotland more than three times as many men as women ‘made away with themselves’, and just over half were farmers while just over a quarter lived and worked in towns. Surviving data from Bavaria demonstrate the difficulty in achieving greater precision: of some 300 cases of suicide reported to the duchy's courts between 1611 and 1670, almost 90 per cent occurred before 1635 – a skewed distribution that presumably reflects the collapse of the judicial system during the Thirty Years War rather than an absence of suicides. But since surviving court records from other decades show that suicides often rose (or at least became more visible) during times of economic and political crisis, it seems highly likely that ‘self-killing’ increased during the mid-seventeenth century.6
Suicides in China certainly increased at this time, but not always for the same reasons. Although, as in Europe, motives included melancholy, economic misery and disappointment in love, as well as desperation during a period of turmoil, many also sought to humiliate, embarrass or harm someone else. This could be achieved relatively easily because Chinese law insisted that a dead body must remain untouched until the local magistrate came to make a full inquiry – one that often uncovered the provocations, the humiliating cruelties, the cheating and the insults that had forced the deceased to take their own life. To remove any possible doubt, many desperate people killed themselves at the exact site where the ill-treatment had taken place: the humiliated apprentice in his master's shop; the young childless bride outside the door of her abusive mother-in-law; the members of a starving family in the orchard of a local magistrate who had failed to ‘nourish the people’ – seen as the primary duty of government officials throughout imperial China (Plate 5).
Such ‘revenge’ suicides may have increased during the turbulent transition from Ming to Qing rule, as the shortage of resources exacerbated tensions and desperation within each family, but three other factors added significantly to the total of women who killed themselves. First, Confucian teaching encouraged virtuous women to commit suicide in two circumstances: those who had been raped or otherwise ‘dishonoured’ should kill themselves immediately to ‘avoid the shame’, while a virtuous widow should ‘follow her husband’ to the grave as soon as he died. The collapse of public order in the mid-seventeenth century dramatically increased the number of women affected by these precepts.
When Qing forces took Yangzhou by storm in 1645 (pages 29–30 above), many women in the city jumped into deep wells or hanged themselves while others burned themselves to death in their own home or slit their throats rather than fall into the hands of the soldiers and be raped, enslaved, or forced to watch the abuse and murder of their families.7 Some young women either slit their noses or cut off their ears, so that they could not be forced to remarry (Confucian rites required a ‘whole body’); others, before killing themselves, composed a brief autobiography in prose followed by a few verses expressing anguish at their plight: a new genre of literature: tibishi, or ‘poems inscribed on walls’. The ‘suicide note’ left by Wei Qinniang, ‘a girl from Chicheng’ (Zhejiang province), seems typical. Just three months after she got married, soldiers captured her and carried her away from her husband (whose fate she never discovered). Somehow she escaped and ‘disfigured my face and covered myself with dirt to obliterate my tracks. During the day I begged by the side of the road and at night I laid low in the blue grass. I swallowed my sobs and wept in secret, fearing that others might find me.’ At last she found shelter in an abandoned temple where ‘I look at my shadow and pity myself: my pretty face has been ruined by dust and wind, and my clothes have all been muddied.’ Eventually ‘With no news from home, I recite a few quatrains and in tears write them on the wall. If some compassionate men of virtue would pass them on to my family, it would suffice to make my lonely parents understand.’ She then killed herself. Her moving farewell, inscribed on the wall of her temple refuge, is all we know about her.8 Other elite women killed themselves out of loyalty to the Ming. Just before her death, the foster-mother of the scholar-official Gu Yanwu told him: ‘Although only a woman, I have received favour from the [Ming] dynasty; to perish with the dynasty is no more than my duty.’ When news arrived that Qing troops were approaching her home, she stopped eating and died 15 days later.9
Many Chinese women killed themselves after war claimed the lives of their husbands. In 1621, for example, the wife of an official in a town in Liaodong heard that it had fallen to Manchu forces. Assuming that her husband had died heroically for the Ming cause, she ‘led more than forty household relatives and retainers i
nto suicide, jumping into a well with her own granddaughter in her arms’. Some husbands expected no less. Just before Yangzhou fell in 1645, Shi Kefa, the Ming commander, wrote two letters of farewell to his wife, both of them enquiring pointedly: ‘[Since] sooner or later I must die, I wonder whether my wife is willing to follow me?‘10 Even the junior scholar Wang Xiuchu expected his pregnant wife to commit suicide rather than survive alone, informing her: ‘“Enemy soldiers have entered the city. If things go awry, you should cut short your own life.” “Yes,” his wife replied: “Let me give you my few pieces of silver to keep.” And then she sobbed, “Women like me in situations like this no longer think to live in the human world.”’ Both the soldier Shi and the scholar Wang thus (in the words of Lynn Struve) ‘expected their wives to place the honour and well-being of their husbands and families above the preservation of their own lives. Times of acute disruption, such as the Ming-Qing conflict, demanded such sacrifices from hundreds of thousands of women.‘11