Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  As Goldstone noted, ‘the cohort that reached ages 26–35 during the 1630s was the largest youth cohort of the entire period 1500–1750’; and a large number of them remained unmarried.88 Such a demographic structure is inherently unstable, not only because those who are young and single are the ones more likely to voice their discontent, but also because (as Goldstone observed) ‘the participation of people in demonstrations or opposition movements depends to some extent on how great they perceive the support of that opposition movement to be’. Therefore, since ‘the more timorous among the discontented may only join an opposition that appears widespread and successful’, the growth of the 26–35 age cohort to unprecedented size in the 1630s would also have increased the chances that people over age 35 would join the opposition. This, in turn, increased the volatility of the whole population.89

  Chinese data, although not as precise as England's parish registers, record a parallel phenomenon. The prevalence of female infanticide inevitably increased the number of ‘bare sticks’ – the common Chinese term for unmarried men – in the next generation. A Fujian gazetteer claimed that during the 1650s almost half of all males remained single because they could not find women to marry; and, as in England, such an unusual demographic pattern would explain why so many people refused to see scarcity as a natural calamity to be stoically endured, but rather as the consequence of human agency to be vigorously protested.90

  In his influential essay Poverty and Famines, inspired by his experience of the Bengal famine of 1943, Amartya Sen argued that ‘Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes.‘91 That is: famines arise more often from distribution problems caused by human agency than from supply problems caused by nature. Whether or not Sen is correct, such ‘anthropocentric’ views convinced many people (in the words of Stephen L. Kaplan) ‘that they were the victims of a terrible conspiracy’. In the early modern world, Kaplan argued,

  Consumers found reasons to question the authenticity of the dearth. They uncovered signs that the harvest was not as bad as announced, that unusual and illegal acts were occurring in the grain trade, that the government was not performing as it was supposed to, and so on. As subsistence anxieties deepened … the conviction grew that the crisis was contrived, that there was a criminal conspiracy afoot against the people, that popular suffering was needless, and that the plotters somehow had to be resisted. The villains were virtually interchangeable from crisis to crisis. They included men of power (ministers … magistrates, and so forth), of great means (for example, financiers, tax farmers, bankers, military contractors), and members of the entourages of several of the key leaders (mistresses and relatives.)

  Much the same anthropocentric assumptions surrounded major epidemics: that they were spread by evil and powerful men (and occasionally women).92

  Such convictions led many people in the early modern period to insist that the authorities could and must do more to provide their subjects with sufficient food and security to ensure survival. The notion that the state's paramount duty was to ‘Nourish the people’ did not only hold sway in China. Politics drawn from the very words of Holy Scripture, a treatise written in 1679 for the heir to the French throne by his tutor, Jean-Bénigne Bossuet, stressed that ‘The prince must provide for the needs of his people’ (the title of one of the book's ‘propositions’). Indeed, Bossuet chided:

  The obligation to take care of the people is the basis of all the rights that sovereigns have over their subjects. That is why, in times of great need, the people have a right to appeal to their prince. ‘In an extreme famine, the people cried to Pharaoh for food.’ The famished people asked for bread from their king, as from a shepherd, or rather as from their father.93

  That is why (Bossuet might have added) early modern rulers who followed Pharaoh's example, and ignored the ‘appeal’ of their people, soon faced more rebellions and revolutions. Indeed, the greatest population losses occurred in precisely the states that experienced not only most famines and wars, but also most rebellions and revolutions: China, Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman empire, Germany and its neighbours, the Iberian Peninsula, France, Britain and Ireland.

  PART II

  ENDURING THE CRISIS

  Peace does not become peace in a single day; a crisis does not become a crisis in a single day. Both become what they are through a gradual accumulation.

  Jia Yi, History of the Han1

  IN A SEMINAL ARTICLE, SIR JOHN ELLIOTT POINTED OUT THAT THE ‘EPIDEMIC of revolutions’ in the 1640s ‘was not, after all, unprecedented’, and he listed not only eight rebellions in western Europe between 1559 and 1569 but also contemporary statements deploring the ubiquity of those upheavals. Thus the Protestant Reformer John Knox warned the ruler of turbulent Scotland in 1561 that ‘Your realm is in no other case at this day than all the other realms of Christendom are'; while John Calvin thought he discerned ‘Europae concussio: the shaking of Europe’ – precisely the same metaphor used by Jeremiah Whittaker and others in the 1640s (page xxi above). And yet, Elliott added, ‘I am not aware that any historian has grouped them together’ and ‘used them as evidence for a “general crisis of the sixteenth century”’.2

  The 1590s, by contrast, have attracted more attention from historians, because the combination of global cooling, harvest failure, plague and war reduced agricultural and industrial production to the lowest levels recorded in three centuries. In addition, ‘Probably never before in European history had so many popular rebellions coincided in time’. Once again, however, Elliott counselled caution. ‘The signs of trouble,’ he conceded, were ‘all around: famine and epidemics, vagrancy and unemployment, riots and revolts. But these were hardly unusual phenomena in the life of early modern Europe’. The 1590s, Elliott suggested, saw not so much ‘another full-blown “general crisis”’, but rather ‘an unusually interesting case of fin de siècle malaise’.3

  In fact, Asia as well as Europe experienced the same ‘malaise’ in the 1590s: civil war in Anatolia almost brought the Ottoman empire to its knees, while Japanese invasions desolated Korea and destabilized both China and Japan itself. Moreover, the entire northern hemisphere experienced extreme climatic events that caused widespread famine and dislocation. In 1594 Yang Dongming, an official in China's Henan province, submitted perhaps the most vivid account of an early modern famine ever written, later printed under the title Album of the Famished, complete with 13 harrowing sketches of the effects of starvation on humans. He described and illustrated families fragmented by famine, children abandoned or sold for food, and entire families committing suicide (see Plate 5). Yang also recorded the extreme weather he had experienced.4 Many of his European contemporaries did the same. In Germany, several Lutheran pastors composed hymns that reproached God for ‘holding back the sunshine and sending heavy rain’, while in England William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, first performed in 1595–6, lamented that

  … the green corn

  Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;

  The fold stands empty in the drowned field …

  And through this distemperature we see

  The seasons alter …

  … the spring, the summer,

  The chiding autumn, angry winter, change

  Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

  By their increase, now knows not which is which.

  Ottoman chroniclers in Hungary and the Balkans also recorded unusually severe winters that froze the Danube solid and complained that ‘The winter – the so-called “merciless soldier” – pressed with its full strength. Terrible storms and snowstorms occurred; all hands and feet were crippled’. The decade also saw both extreme droughts and floods that ruined the harvests. In Italy, when extreme weather destroyed the 1591 harvest, crowds in Rome mobbed the pope demanding food; the magistrates o
f Naples expelled 2,000 foreign students from the city, to reduce food consumption, and issued bread ration cards to citizens; while bread prices in Sicily reached their highest level for two centuries. In Scandinavia, people looked back on 1591 as ‘the black year in which the grass did not turn green at all’, while in 1596 and again in 1597 there was ‘so dreadful a hunger that the greater part of the people had to [eat] bread made of bark’.5

  These striking data from the 1590s remind us that the global cooling of the 1640s, like the ‘epidemic of revolutions’, ‘was not, after all, unprecedented'; and so they support the scepticism of Niels Steensgaard, who wrote that the concept of a seventeenth-century ‘General Crisis’ has ‘become a synonym for what historians in other centuries call “history”’.6 This volume respectfully disagrees. It contends, by contrast, that the 1640s saw more rebellions and revolutions than any comparable period in world history. Admittedly, few of the new regimes endured (the Republican experiments in Catalonia, Naples and England collapsed in a matter of days, weeks and years, respectively); but some proved permanent (the Portuguese revolt) or lasted for centuries (the ‘Great Enterprise’ of the Qing in China; the demise of Spain as a Great Power; the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland).

  The seventeenth century experienced extremes of weather seldom witnessed before and never (so far) since: the only known occasion on which the Bosporus froze over (1620–1); the only time that floods in Mecca destroyed part of the Kaaba (1630); the coldest winter ever recorded in Scandinavia (1641); and so on. This combination of natural and human disasters had profound human consequences. Infanticide and suicide in China rose to unequalled levels; far fewer European women married, and others did so only in their thirties; many Frenchmen, their growth stunted by famine and cold, were of shorter stature than any others on record. These diverse physical indicators all reflect conditions that were both unique and universal – but China, then as now the most populous state on the planet, apparently suffered worst and longest.

  5

  The ‘Great Enterprise’ in China, 1618–841

  IN 1645, DEPRESSED BY THE SUICIDE OF THE LAST MING EMPEROR TO RULE from Beijing, a gentleman-scholar named Xia Yunyi decided to dictate his memoirs before he killed himself:

  In agony and wrath at the emperor's death, my reason to live has ended … So what more is there to say? I just fear that, regarding the rise and fall of the state, the advance and retreat of worthy and base men, the origins and ends of bandits, and the sources of arms and provisions, those who instruct later generations will miss the realities. Is what I remember worth putting into words? Well, if what I say here has the fortune to survive, later generations will be able to ponder that question.2

  Later generations did indeed ponder Xia's Account that will be fortunate to survive long after he committed suicide, as well as more than 200 other accounts of the fall of the Ming dynasty, and virtually all laid the blame upon an unprecedented combination of domestic problems and foreign threats.

  In 2010 the eminent sinologist Timothy Brook reached the same conclusion. ‘The fall of the Ming dynasty is many histories,’ he wrote:

  The history of the expansion of the Manchu empire on the northeast border, the history of the most massive rebellions to wash over China since the fourteenth century, the history of the disintegration of the Ming state, and the history of a major climate episode. Different in the stories they tell, they overlap and together constitute the same history.3

  The immense size and complexity of the Ming state complicate the task of telling these overlapping ‘stories’. By 1600 China included almost 200 million acres of cultivated land, spread over 20 degrees of latitude, with climates ranging from tropical to subarctic. It formed the most ecologically diverse state of its day. In addition, its two major river systems, the Yangzi and Yellow rivers, linked by the Grand Canal, underpinned the most diverse, unified, wealthy and populous economy of the early modern world. The Ming emperors ruled over far more subjects than anyone else (Fig. 16).4 Nevertheless in spring 1644 the dynasty's northern capital, Beijing, fell twice: first to an army of rebels from the northwest, and a few weeks later to Manchu invaders from the northeast, who drove out the rebels. The victors then undertook campaigns of conquest that eventually created a state twice as large as Ming China and endured for two centuries. No other political change in the mid-seventeenth century affected so many people, caused so much damage, or created such lasting consequences.

  16. Ming China and its neighbours.

  Most maps of East Asia use Mercator's projection, which increases the size of Ming China compared with the steppes where the Manchu dynasty achieved dominance in the early seventeenth century. In 1644, the Great Wall failed to protect Beijing (the Ming northern capital) from capture, first by a bandit army from the west and then by the Manchus from the north. Nanjing (the southern capital) fell the following year.

  Manchus versus Ming

  The late Ming regime suffered from three endemic weaknesses. First, although Chinese subjects revered their emperor as Tianzi (‘Son of Heaven’) and assigned him sole power to make authoritative rulings, he could only enforce them in cooperation with a bureaucracy of some 15,000 highly educated elite males. Although recruited through competitive examinations open to almost all, the bureaucrats came overwhelmingly from the land-owning class, and their personal wealth brought an independence that enabled them to criticize, disobey and even defy an emperor who failed to meet their expectations. Second, despite their economic independence, even the senior bureaucrats (the Grand Secretaries) had limited opportunities to convey their views in person because the late Ming emperors spent their entire lives isolated in the ‘Forbidden City’ in Beijing, a walled compound of some 200 acres surrounded by a wide moat where tens of thousands of eunuchs staffed the agencies that managed the imperial household (including its granaries and treasury as well as its ceremonies) and handled the emperor's correspondence. Third, since the prevailing Confucian ideology aimed to promote harmony and peace, Ming officials tended to favour the least disruptive and least expensive policies, to organize factions to preserve the status quo, and to denounce innovators as traitors.

  These weaknesses became prominent in the early seventeenth century when the Wanli emperor (1573–1620), frustrated by the obstructionism and denunciations of his bureaucrats, left official posts unfilled and refused to sign orders. Instead, he used the imperial eunuchs who answered to the Director of the Ceremonial Department (in effect, the emperor's chief of staff and always a eunuch) to circumvent the civil service and carry out his orders. His successor, the Tianqi emperor (1620–7), went further: he made the eunuch Wei Zhongxian his chief minister and used the palace eunuchs, now 80,000 strong, as diplomats, trade and factory superintendents, tax inspectors and government supervisors, even generals and admirals. They thus formed an ‘alternative administration’ that reported directly to Wei.

  Tianqi's half-brother the Chongzhen emperor (1627–44) initially relied less on eunuchs but proved both stubborn and suspicious in dealing with the bureaucracy. Of the 160 Grand Secretaries appointed during the entire Ming era (1368–1644) Chongzhen appointed no fewer than 50, almost all of whom he removed in response to a remonstrance or denunciation by a jealous colleague. Such inconstancy precluded the formulation and implementation of effective strategies to meet the numerous challenges that faced the empire: instead of discussing how to save it, ministers concentrated on finding someone to blame. The emperor, like his predecessors, therefore relied increasingly on eunuchs in both civil and military affairs.

  As paralysis gripped the Ming government, a small nomadic group living beyond its northeast frontier created a new state. At first their leader Nurhaci (1559–1626) accepted Ming suzerainty, leading tribute missions to Beijing in person, learning to read Chinese, and studying Chinese history and military practice; but he also strove to unite into a single confederation the various tribes that inhabited the steppes of central Asia. By 1600 Nurhaci commanded at least 15,000
warriors organized into permanent companies (known as niru, from the Manchu word for ‘arrow’) containing some 300 fighting men, normally from the same village and sometimes from the same clan. Each niru formed part of a Banner (gūsa, the Manchu term for a ‘large military division’) commanded by a member of Nurhaci's family. Manchu warriors valued horsemanship and archery; they revered as their ancestors the Mongols who had conquered China four centuries before; and, like the Mongols, they shaved the hair on their foreheads and wore the rest in a queue behind. For some time, the new Manchu state prospered from trade (especially from exporting ginseng to China), from war booty (both property and persons), and from agriculture (mostly performed by their slaves).

  The situation altered dramatically when climate change struck East Asia. In China, imperial officials reported in 1615 that they had received a deluge of petitions for disaster relief, and that ‘Although the situation differs in each place, all tell of localities gripped by disaster, the people in flight, brigands roaming at will, and the corpses of the famished littering the roads.’ The following year, a Shandong official submitted an Illustrated handbook of the great starvation of the people of Shandong (1616). The situation in Manchuria was even worse. When Nurhaci's advisers suggested that invading China might alleviate the famine, he retorted angrily: ‘We do not even have enough food to feed ourselves. If we conquer them, how will we feed them?‘5 Nevertheless, perhaps to conserve his remaining resources, Nurhaci first declared himself independent of China and stopped sending tribute; then, in 1618, he followed his advisers’ suggestion and invaded Liaodong, a province north of the Great Wall where subjects of the Ming cultivated wheat and millet during the short but intense growing season. This delivered into Manchu hands perhaps one million new subjects – but, almost immediately, global cooling produced the result that Nurhaci had predicted: a Manchu chronicle noted that the year 1620 was the first year of high rice prices, and added ‘thereafter there were no years in which rice was not expensive’.6