Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Travellers gladly leave these hearths behind;

  Residents rely [only] on low walls.

  If half the Central Plain is like this,

  How can one escape wind and frost?

  Chen Bangyan, commander of Ming forces further south in Guangdong, wrote a short poem after Qing forces entered the city he was defending (they later tortured him to death):

  No fists, no braves left. No rations, no soldiers.

  Bonded with mountains and sea, I swore to help restore [the Ming.]

  Fate gave us no help. We were entangled in misfortune.

  One thousand autumns hence, let this solitary inscription give witness.5

  Perhaps, however, some Chinese writers overlooked signs of post-war recovery. Although poets continued for over a century to use the metaphor ‘the Weed-covered city’ whenever they referred to Yangzhou, whose sack in 1645 was the most brutal episode of the entire Ming-Qing transition (see chapter 5 above), the city's school reopened within a year, and two years after that a dozen home-grown scholars took and passed the metropolitan examination – an unequivocal sign that some of the elite had survived the atrocities and accepted Qing rule. Within a decade Yangzhou boasted a new foundling home and several restored temples; and by 1664, according to one contemporary, more than one hundred gardens adorned the waterways just outside the city walls, where pleasure boats could be rented. After another decade, the local Gazetteer depicted Yangzhou as once again a suitable venue for scholars to meet and write, drink wine and tour the sites; and when the Kangxi emperor visited these sites, local merchants, officials, poets and artists entertained him with opera, banquets and lantern shows. The ‘Weed-covered city’ had come a long way.6

  As in Europe, travel journals also illuminate the extent of postwar recovery. In 1658 Johannes Nieuhof, secretary of a Dutch diplomatic mission, kept a detailed illustrated journal of what he saw as he travelled the 1,500 miles that separate Canton from Beijing. Although he included no images of a ruined city (perhaps because the Qing official on his barge forbade him), Nieuhof noted that one town after another had been ‘totally ruin'd and sack'd’ by the Qing, starting with Canton, which was ‘turn'd to a map of misery’ when Tartars took it by storm in 1650, with ‘more than 80,000 people slain, not including those who perished with hunger’. At Nanchang, a provincial capital, all but one of the ‘rare buildings which had been formerly in this city were totally destroy'd by the Tartars’; while Hutron (Jiangxi province), ‘a very pleasant city full of industry before the distruction of China’, was now desolate.7

  Nevertheless, like the poets who harped upon the ‘Weed-covered city’, Nieuhof exaggerated. First, as in Germany, some of the urban centres ‘totally ruin'd’ by troops made a rapid recovery. Thus only six years after the sack, Nieuhof found Canton once more a thriving commercial centre. ‘Although this city was lamentably laid waste,’ he wrote, ‘it was in a few years after restor'd to its former lustre.’ Second, Nieuhof conceded that while ‘It is a maxim among the Tartars, that such cities as revolt against them, and are subdu'd by force of arms, should be serv'd after this manner’ – that is, sacked – ‘such as yield without any opposition, have no hurt done unto them’. Since almost every town along the Grand Canal had opened its gates to the Qing ‘without any opposition’, north of Yangzhou Nieuhof found bustling economic activity and ‘great store of rice’ almost everywhere, and a countryside ‘so full of buildings as if it were all but one continu'd village’.8

  If only such optimistic parts of Nieuhof's travelogue had survived – or if Ray's Observations were the only source on post-war Germany – historians might with justification ask ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Travellers, however, tend to follow the fastest and safest route between one notable tourist site and the next, and Nieuhof travelled up the Grand Canal in style aboard a special barge, while Ray did the same as he and his students travelled up the Rhine. The Scottish student James Fraser also took the highways, not the byways, and therefore tended to pass through precisely those areas likely to have recovered fastest – which would explain the presence of that ‘curteous and discreet’ ‘croud of pedlers and pannier-bearers’. Nevertheless, the ashes of war, like a run of natural disasters, did not always produce a phoenix: sometimes they stifled rather than stimulated the survivors. To reprise just three rural examples: in the Scottish borders, farmers never returned to cultivate the Pentland Hills after global cooling and marauding troops ended the viability of their farms; in India, the cotton and cotton weavers of Gujarat never returned after famine and floods destroyed the market for their goods; and in China, sericulture vanished from the province of Shaanxi after the trauma of the Ming-Qing transition, despite a tradition that went back 2,000 years. The same was true of towns. For every Nanjing there was a Nanchang, for every Vienna there was a Höchst: places whose population would remain below – often far below – pre-war levels for the rest of the century and even beyond. Demographic recovery after the Global Crisis depended on a benign synergy of human and natural factors.

  ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’

  Much of pre-industrial Europe saw a ‘baby boom’ whenever wars ceased because (in the words of a French man of letters) some areas were ‘so fertile that what war destroys in one year regenerates in two’; while others (in the words of another scholar) ‘resemble a fine fat bird: the more you pluck it, the more its feathers grow’. The later seventeenth century was no exception.9 Abandoned farms on prime land normally recovered first and fastest, their natural fertility temporarily enhanced by enforced fallowing; and as soon as it was safe to do so, unmarried or widowed survivors took advantage of the vacant lands and houses left by each catastrophe (whether human or natural in origin) to marry, move in and start a family. In Italy's Aosta valley, war and plague killed 600 inhabitants of one village in 1630–1, leaving about 600 survivors; yet whereas the 1620s saw only 5 marriages a year, 14 took place in 1630 and 38 in 1631. Moreover, whereas the annual average number of baptisms in the 1620s had been 24, the year 1630 saw 42, and each year of the next decade saw 25 – meaning that a population half the size had managed to produce more babies.10

  The return of security stimulated not only increases in the native population of war-ravaged villages on fertile land but also a flood of immigrants. Thus although the Thirty Years War reduced by 80 per cent the population of the lands ruled by the Benedictine monastery of Ottobeuren in south Germany (a fief consisting of a market town, 18 villages and scores of scattered hamlets), as soon as peace returned ‘literally thousands of travellers’ arrived ‘from all over Germany and indeed from all over Europe’. Some were inhabitants returning after taking refuge elsewhere, while the rest included ‘travelling players, demobilized soldiers, widows, orphans, and vagrants’, such as ‘Monsieur Robert de Villa, French nobleman’, ‘Nicholas Harp from London in England with four children’ and the ‘noble Irish lord’ Raymond O'Dea ‘plundered and driven into exile by the English heretics’. Many of these homeless refugees settled in the half-empty villages of the Ottobeuren lands: almost half of all the marriages in the estate in the 1650s involved at least one immigrant.11

  Urban populations could also rebound swiftly after a catastrophe. In Italy, marriages in the port-city of Genoa during each of the three years after the plague of 1656–7 were twice as numerous as in the three years before – for much the same reasons as in the Aosta valley: the catastrophe had left a glut of vacant houses and jobs, and so people could afford to marry younger. Elsewhere, in-migration proved critical. In the Ottoman empire, the population of the port-city of Izmir (Smyrna) in Anatolia rose from perhaps 3,000 in 1603 to 40,000 in 1648 and over 100,000 in 1700, largely through migration – some from neighbouring villages, others from the Balkans (including the parents of Shabbatai Zvi), and others still from beyond, such as refugees from the massacres in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (including Sarah, the wife of Shabbatai). In Spain, the population of the port-city of Cádiz tripled from 7,000 in 1600 to 22,000 in 1650, and alm
ost doubled again to 41,000 in 1700, thanks to three factors: strong in-migration from the surrounding villages; a strict quarantine that excluded the plague epidemic that devastated its economic rival Seville in 1649–50; and the city's growing trade with the Americas (largely at the expense of Seville).12

  Accommodating migrants sometimes required compromises. Thus the city of Venice lost almost 50,000 of its citizens during the plague of 1630–1, over half of them ‘merchants and artisans’ belonging to the city's guilds. Previously, all guilds had admitted only native sons, but for three years after the plague they welcomed qualified immigrants in order to restore their numerical strength. In Brandenburg, the ‘Great Elector’ Frederick William issued a decree ‘by virtue of princely power and sovereign authority’ that ‘all persons prepared to rebuild a devastated and abandoned peasant farm must without exception be granted six years free of taxes, rents, and military quartering’ – a measure that provoked widespread protests from landowners who resented the unilateral declaration of a rent ‘holiday’ and feared that foreign colonists would simply come, ‘exhaust the soil’ and then ‘disappear into the dust’. Naturally the Great Elector ignored the protests. Most remarkable of all, the city-state of Lucca sought to replace its plague dead after 1631 by granting safe conduct and asylum to all outlaws from other states (provided they had not committed treason, heresy, counterfeiting or murder on the highway). The certificates of asylum issued expressly to restore the population to its pre-plague level fill two fat registers in the city archives.13

  Many post-war migrants were veterans. Thus almost 5,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry returned to Finland in 1650 after the end of the ‘continental war’, their pockets filled with the money provided by German taxpayers to pay their wage arrears. Even more veterans went home to Sweden, and since most of them were in their late teens and twenties, their return with money in their pockets added a substantial cohort of ‘eligible bachelors’ to communities where, for many years, women had far outnumbered men (see chapter 8 above).14 In France, Spain, the Low Countries and Switzerland, too, the return of the veterans no doubt injected wealth into countless communities; while in England, between 1660 and 1662, the king's treasury paid out nearly £800,000 in wage arrears to the thousands of soldiers and sailors of the Republic who laid down their arms at the Restoration – and thus returned to civilian life far richer than they had left it.15

  Nevertheless, despite a baby boom and an influx of migrants, the same factors that normally limited population growth in the early modern world still prevailed. Steady and significant demographic increase required not only the return of peace but also a respite from epidemic diseases, and the return of prosperity for merchants and manufacturers. Although this constellation prevailed in Japan and Mughal India after the 1650s, the population of most west European states began to recover only after the famine of 1660–2, while in China the ‘Kangxi depression’ (caused by the continuing war against Ming loyalists and the embargo on coastal trade) lasted until the 1680s. Moreover, even with optimal economic conditions, the ‘depleted cohorts’ created by major catastrophes earlier in the century – 1618–21, 1630–1, 1647–53, 1661–2 – continued to restrict growth. Not only did these cohorts lack the numbers to restore the previous population level, by a sad coincidence new episodes of famine or disease further reduced their numbers just as they reached marriageable age: 1672–5, 1694–6 and so on (see chapter 4 above). Finally, the ‘urban graveyard effect’ continued to take its toll. Thus in northern Italy, famine, plague and war ravaged the duchy of Mantua in 1630–1, affecting city and countryside alike; and yet, three decades later, some English tourists found Mantua ‘a great city but not answerably populous, having not yet recovered it self of the losses it sustained when it was miserably sackt by the Emperor Ferdinand II's Army in the year 1630’. By contrast, they noted ‘the country' round about’ ‘is very rich’. The tourists were correct: a census in 1676 revealed that the rural areas of the duchy had regained over 90 per cent of their pre-war population whereas the capital languished below 70 per cent.16 Such imbalances, which occurred elsewhere in Europe, altered the balance of power between town and country. Thus in 1600 the magistrates of the town of Memmingen in Germany contemptuously dismissed the neighbouring peasants as bumpkins ‘with neither enough cattle, grain nor other victuals or goods to justify the establishment of a single annual market’. A century later, by contrast, their descendants had to concede that the town and the surrounding villages ‘are bound together, such that one always has need of the other, and in such a manner that each party must always uphold and maintain the motto “the one hand washes the other”’.17

  Apparently the only European cities to escape post-war stagnation were the capitals, where the growth of central government and the conspicuous consumption of the court stimulated growth and attracted immigrants, and the North Atlantic ports, where burgeoning trade with America created both wealth and jobs. Most other cities would not regain either their pre-crisis populations or their economic dominance until the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.

  The lack of parish registers makes it more difficult to establish whether the end of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis also produced a ‘baby boom’ outside Europe, but in at least two areas this outcome seems unlikely. First, in those parts of West Africa where between one-third and one-half of all slaves captured and deported were female (notably west central Africa and the lands around the Bight of Biafra), it is hard to see how communities could have maintained a stable population, let alone increased. Second, in those parts of Asia where teenage female marriage was almost universal, and female infanticide was the principal means of easing population pressure, the demographic regime possessed no ‘unused capacity’ of fertility after the crisis to assist recovery. Births would therefore have remained low for at least one generation. Any increase in the Chinese population during the Ming-Qing transition therefore probably reflects some decrease in mortality and, even more, migration from poor to rich lands.

  The new dynasty certainly did its best to promote resettlement. They briefly granted ‘drifters’ (liumin) who had settled on abandoned lands a permanent title to them, regardless of the claims of others. They also lent seed corn to poor cultivators; created village pawnshops (for a while, the Kangxi emperor personally determined the amounts and terms of each loan); and offered incentives (such as travel costs, start-up loans, freehold land and farming stock and equipment) to any farmer prepared to migrate to the ravaged lands in the north and west. The number who took advantage of these schemes ‘during the late seventeenth century and eighteenth centuries alone easily surpassed 10,000,000’. Thanks to these measures, the total cultivated land in the empire, which had fallen to 67 million acres in 1645, climbed back to 90 million acres in 1661 and to 100 million acres in 1685 – although since over 191 million acres of Chinese soil had been under cultivation in 1600, the heavy footprint of the Global Crisis remained perceptible well into the eighteenth century.18

  A Second Agricultural Revolution

  A baby boom normally stimulates the agricultural sector, since every new mouth needs to be fed, encouraging farmers to invest in irrigation and drainage works, to improve the yield of traditional crops and to introduce new ones. In Mughal India the versatile peasants of the Ganges valley, who already cultivated almost 50 different crops in the early seventeenth century, added maize (as well as tobacco, the other New World ‘miracle crop’) to their repertory; while the farmers of west central Africa began to plant not only maize but also manioc (originally a Brazilian crop) as a safeguard against the failure of the millet and sorghum harvests during drought. Manioc proved particularly valuable in wartime, since raiders might neglect the tubers below the ground. In the western Netherlands, and in eastern England, the disastrous harvests of the mid-seventeenth century encouraged the systematic rotation of cereal with root vegetables (such as carrots and turnips), and the sowing of clover and other crops rich in nitrogen. In 1650 Samuel
Hartlib, a refugee from the Thirty Years War who settled in England, published A discours of husbandrie used in Brabant and Flaunders, later expanded to include information from New England and Ireland, showing how new methods of tillage and rotation made otherwise unproductive soils profitable; how to identify and to sow the strains best suited to each locality; and how to use chemical fertilizers to optimal effect. Hartlib also carried out experiments concerning the relative yields of different methods of farming. Some English historians have hailed these practical and theoretical efforts, which gathered momentum in the 1640s and 1650s, as an ‘agricultural revolution’.19

  Chinese farmers also innovated at this time, notably by cultivating maize, peanuts and sweet potatoes: three crops recently imported from the Americas, which thrived in marginal soils, resisted both droughts and locusts, did not require transplanting like rice, and produced twice as much as other dry-land crops with far less labour input. According to a Gazetteer from Jiangxi province, ‘in general, maize is grown on the sunny side of the hills, sweet potatoes on the shady side’ while maize ‘provides half a year's food for the mountain dwellers’. Sucheta Mazumdar has hailed these improvements during the later seventeenth century as China's ‘second agricultural revolution’, one ‘predicated on the maximum utilization of all crops and the development of complementary patterns of crop selection’. It allowed the average intake of adult males to rise above the vital threshold of 2,500 calories per day, and supplied more protein and vitamins – thereby both improving health and reducing hunger (see chapter 1 above).20

  The Consumer Revolution

  Domestic demand normally drove pre-industrial economies. Although the sight of stately East Indiamen returning to Europe's Atlantic ports filled with exotic goods from Asia captured the imagination of contemporaries, their cargoes amounted to (at most) 2 per cent of Europe's Gross Domestic Product. Put another way, all the goods transported by sea from Asia to Europe in an entire year would today fit inside a single container ship. The trade goods exchanged with Europe were even less significant as a percentage of Asia's Gross Domestic Product: as Jack Goldstone put it, ‘The total volume of European trade was never more than just over 1 per cent of China's economy’.21 Even the intercontinental trade between Europe and the Americas reached significant volume and value only in the 1690s. By contrast, the need to feed, clothe and house the ‘baby boomers’ and their families after the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century stimulated every sector of the economy.