These reactions differed little from those of educated observers elsewhere in the world. In Sri Lanka, in 1665, a chronicler associated the outbreak of rebellion against the king of Kandy with the ‘fearful blazing star … right over our heads’; while in India, ‘during the whole duration of the comet’ even Aurangzeb, a devout Muslim, ‘drank only a little water and ate a small quantity of millet bread’, and also ‘slept on the ground with only a tiger skin over him’. In 1680, in China, the Manchu Bannerman Dzengšeo and his comrades fighting in Yunnan watched the progress of the comet with misgivings and argued ‘that if it advanced towards the imperial palace it would be a bad omen’; and the official history of the Kangxi reign included a precise record of both that and the 1682 fireball.70 Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Increase Mather (preacher at the North Church in Boston and president of Harvard College) delivered a sermon about the 1680 comet entitled ‘Heaven's alarm to the world’, which warned ‘that fearful sights and signs in heaven are the presages of great calamities at hand’. The fireball of 1682 inspired Mather to compose his comprehensive Kometographia, or a discourse concerning comets, which reminded his readers that the Thirty Years War and the destruction of the native population of New England had followed the comets of 1618, while the plague and fire that devastated London had followed that of 1664. It was only because ‘we that live in America know but little of the great motions of Europe, much less in Africa and Asia, until a long time afterwards’ that news of yet more catastrophic consequences had not reached Boston.71
Exactly half a century before, Descartes had expressed the hope that someone would publish in a single book all ‘the observations of comets, with a table of the paths of each one’. He predicted that ‘such a work would be of greater public utility than it might seem at first sight’, but (he continued with a sigh) ‘I have no hope that anyone will do it’ because ‘I think it is a skill beyond the reach of the human mind’. Isaac Newton took up this challenge in the 1680s, carefully copying into his notebooks the descriptions of comets that he found in Aristotle, medieval chronicles and more modern accounts, as well as the observations made by his contemporaries – not only Edmond Halley (who travelled to several European observatories to check their records) and John Flamsteed (the astronomer royal) but also the Jesuit Valentin Stansel from Brazil, the Harvard astronomer Thomas Brattle and his former schoolmate Arthur Storer, now a planter slave-owner in Calvert County, Maryland, who transmitted outstanding observations of the 1682 comet. Newton incorporated these and other findings gleaned from informants all around the world in his remarkable Mathematical Principles of 1687, of which the third book (entitled ‘The System of the World’) contained a long section about comets (Fig. 55).72 Newton also used his newly invented mathematical technique, later known as calculus, to plot the course of the 1680 comet and concluded that it had come from outer space on a parabolic curve around the sun and would never return.
Here Newton was wrong – and so were all but one of the scientists who calculated that comets followed an elliptical orbit and so periodically returned. The French astronomer royal, Pierre Petit, argued (incorrectly) that the 1664 comet was the same as that of 1618, and would reappear in 1710; his successor Giandomenico Cassini deduced (also incorrectly) that the 1680 comet had previously appeared in 1577 and would therefore reappear in 1784. None of them won the prize set up by ex-Queen Christina. Edmond Halley would also have reached the wrong conclusion if he had decided to study the 1680 comet, but instead he focused on the fireball that appeared two years later – which happened to be the only short-period comet that is clear to the naked eye (others may be as bright, or brighter, but they appear only once in a millennium or less).
55. Sources of information used by Newton in Principia Mathematica (1687).
Newton never left England (indeed, while working on the Mathematical Principles, he does not appear to have left Cambridge), but he received abundant data gathered by friends, and friends of friends, both Protestant and Catholic, from all the continents, which he used to form and support his hypotheses. The configuration of the principal trade routes of the 1680s explains the location of most of his data-gathering points.
Like Newton, Halley combined observation with historical study and his close reading of the accounts of all previous apparitions convinced him that the comets that appeared in 1531, in 1607 and in 1682 were one and the same, and that it must therefore circle the sun in a 75- or 76-year cycle. He then calculated its exact orbit, using Newton's physics to account for the effect of the gravitational pull of the planets that it passed. In 1705 Halley published a short pamphlet in Latin and English that first set out his rationale about the orbit of comets in general, and the exact periodicity of the 1682 comet in particular, and then ‘dare[d] venture to foretell’ that the same comet ‘will return again in the year 1758’. Although Halley did not live to see it, when a comet duly appeared in 1758, identical to the one described in 1682, contemporaries named it ‘Halley's Comet’ in his honour. Halley's short treatise included another prediction: although no previous comet ‘has threaten'd the Earth’, he noted that the orbits of some fireballs come close enough to raise the possibility that one day a collision might occur, and he ended his pamphlet with the ominous words: ‘What might be the consequences’ of ‘the shock of celestial bodies (which is by no means impossible to come to pass), I leave to be discuss'd by the studious of physical matters’.73
Halley's 1705 pamphlet epitomized the dazzling achievements (and self-confidence) of the Scientific Revolution. It provided irrefutable proof that comets, like planets, orbited the sun; it offered an impressive test of Newtonian physics; and it also made two accurate predictions: the first vindicated when the comet returned after exactly 76 years, the second when part of a comet struck Jupiter with dramatic results almost three centuries later. Yet no one in 1705 – or even in 1750 – knew how dazzling Halley's achievement really was: even his first prediction could not be verified for 76 years. One might therefore object that, in the scientific sphere as in the field of education, the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and the rest of the world had not yet occurred; but this overlooks an important difference.
In his ‘Introduction’ to the 2009 special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, dedicated to the General Crisis in Europe, Theodore Rabb noted ‘the transformation of attitudes toward science’, which ‘in the decades after 1640 went from concerns about its bewildering, contested and controversial quest for knowledge to the acceptance of scientific method as the magisterial form of intellectual endeavour. To move from the condemnation of Galileo to the knighthood of Isaac Newton is to traverse a fundamental divide in European thought.’ In another article, Rabb stressed that this ‘divide’ lay not only in the advances made by scientists, but also in the political and social context in which their ‘intellectual endeavour’ took place. In the first half of the seventeenth century, it
Corresponded closely with a growing malaise, as religious war, economic boom and bust, the spread of ever more virulent military conflicts, and the encroachment of centralizing governments on local autonomies caused widespread disruption and distress. In this context the unprovable demands that the scientists were putting forward for jettisoning old ideas seemed both a symptom of, and a stimulus to, the fires of doubt.
After 1650, by contrast, ‘looking to restore a sense of confidence, Europe's elite found reassurance and a tangible certainty in the increasingly united claims for new truths about the physical world’. Rabb argued that, on their own, ‘the discoveries would not necessarily have gained wide acceptance. It was their role in restoring confidence in human capacity that gave them their magisterial status.’ ‘Useful’ knowledge had ceased to be threatening.74
Even by the end of the seventeenth century, however, this new ‘confidence’ was neither complete nor universal in Europe. On their visit to Naples in 1663, Skippon and Ray heard complaints from the Academici Investigantes ‘of the Inquisition, and their clergym
en's opposition to the new philosophy; and of the difficulty they met with in getting books out of England, Holland etc’. Four years later, in Tuscany, papal pressure ended the Grand Duke's efforts to gather and study serial data on the climate. In England, Edmond Halley's doubts about the veracity of the Bible (for example, questioning the existence of a single act of Creation) cost him the chair of astronomy at Oxford University in 1691: the astronomer royal (one of his referees) warned that, if appointed, Halley would ‘corrupt the youth of the university with his lewd discourse’. Newton and others duly prevented the election of such a subversive.75 In Scotland, the High Court tried and executed a student at Edinburgh University for blasphemy in 1697.
It is here that Robert Merton's ‘multiples’ come into play: in Europe, censorship in one country no longer affected scientific innovation elsewhere. Thus, despite the papal ban on holding heliocentric opinions, in London, John Milton's Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, contains an admirable summary of Galileo's Dialogue of the Two Systems as well as numerous references to telescopic observation, rotating sunspots and irregularities on the moon's surface; while the ‘Tuscan Artist’ (Galileo) is the only contemporary mentioned in the entire work. Likewise, although in 1663 the Roman Inquisition placed the works of Descartes on the ‘Index of Prohibited Books’, a few years later Louis XIV chose Jacques Rohault, France's leading Cartesian, as mathematics and philosophy tutor to his heir; and in the 1670s the young man attended open discussions of the heliocentric theory at the Academy of Sciences, and followed the rotation of the comets, stars and planets during his visits to the Observatory created by his father.76 The Scientific Revolution had been nationalized.
The situation in China was very different. In 1661 the Qing government set up a literary inquisition to review an unof–ficial Ming History published by a group of Han scholars in Jiangnan. Deeming it seditious, they executed some 70 men involved in the venture, including historians, printers and even purchasers of the work; exiled their male relatives and condemned their female relatives to serve as slaves in Manchu households; confiscated all their property; and burned all copies and all blocks of the book. As in Europe, harsh penalties led to widespread self-censorship among survivors.77 Just over a century later, the central government initiated a massive bibliographic project known as ‘The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries’, which aimed to secure a copy of all known books for the imperial library – but ‘If the books contain language that is anti-dynastic,’ the emperor commanded, ‘then the woodblocks and printed sheets must both be put to the flames. Heterodox opinions must be quashed, [so] that later generations may not be influenced.’ The literary inquisition, which lasted for 15 years, destroyed 70,000 printing blocks and incinerated almost 4,000 works, while authors and printers purged many other works themselves, re-carving some individual blocks and removing censored names and statements from others.78
The Qing thus continued to see intellectual innovation and much ‘useful knowledge’ as a potential threat, not a potential asset. For them, ‘new truths about the physical world’ continued to seem ‘both a symptom of, and a stimulus to, the fires of doubt’. Unlike rulers in northwest Europe, China's new masters refused to allow their leading scholars either freedom of expression or freedom to exchange ideas. Taken together with the different ‘welfare ratio’ that prevailed in the different locations by the early eighteenth century (see chapter 21 above), despite numerous similarities, the origins of the ‘Great Divergence’ lay in the Global Crisis.
Conclusion: The Crisis Anatomized
Winners and Losers
Crane Brinton's classic study Anatomy of Revolution, first published in 1938, sought ‘uniformities’ between the political upheavals in seventeenth-century England, eighteenth-century North America and France, and twentieth-century Russia. In the last chapter, Brinton asked ‘What did these revolutions really change?’, and he answered:
Some institutions, some laws, even some human habits, they clearly changed in very important ways; other institutions, laws and habits they changed in the long run but slightly if at all. It may be that what they changed is more – or less – significant than what they did not change. But we cannot begin to decide the last matter until we have got the actual changes straight.
The preceding pages have attempted to ‘get straight’ what changed and what stayed the same in the seventeenth-century world; it now remains to assess their relative significance and to ascertain the ‘uniformities’ among the 50 or so revolutions and rebellions that occurred around the world between 1618 and 1688.1
At the individual level, the most ‘significant’ change for most contemporaries was a sharp deterioration in the overall quality of life. During the Indian famine of 1631, English merchants living in Gujarat considered that ‘The times here are so miserable that never in the memory of man [has] the like famine and mortality happened.’ Ten years later, in China, according to the diary kept by a young scholar, ‘Jiangnan has never experienced this kind of disaster’. In 1647 a Welsh historian opined: ‘'Tis tru we have had many such black days in England in former ages, but those parallel'd to the present are to the shadow of a mountain compar'd to the eclipse of the moon’; while during the famine of 1649, a Scottish colleague wrote that ‘The pryces of victuall and cornes of all sortes wer heigher than ever heirtofore aney[one] living could remember’, so that ‘the lyke had never beine seine in this kingdome heretofor, since it was a natione’.2
All ages produce pessimists who claim that the hardships they face are the ‘worst in living memory’, and the mid-seventeenth century produced unprecedented numbers of pessimists, and claims of unequalled misery – but the surviving evidence suggests that they were right. Because of the decrease in solar energy and the increase in volcanic and El Niño activity, the environmental deterioration has few parallels; while the frequency of wars and state breakdown created unprecedented political, social and economic instability.
Some groups suffered disproportionately. Slaves led the way. In China, in parts of Europe (notably Britain and Ireland), and above all in Africa, millions of men and women lost their liberty and often their lives because they became slaves; while millions more in Russia and eastern Europe also lost their liberty because they became serfs. Whether free or unfree, women also suffered disproportionately in most parts of the world. Women killed themselves because they had been raped and otherwise humiliated and could not ‘live with the shame’; because they were destitute and could not face a life of hunger and deprivation; or because they did not wish to survive the death or disappearance of their loved ones. Many of the survivors faced a ‘bitter living’ (in the memorable words of ‘a poor woman with only a small field or so to her name’ in Germany): she and her sisters had to work harder and longer just to stay alive. Their desperate situation helps to explain why so many women around the seventeenth-century world aborted, killed or abandoned their infant children.3
Admittedly, some European women could use the ‘weapons of the weak’ to retaliate against their oppressors. Female workers and servants abused by their employers could seek revenge not only through foot-dragging, pilfering and slander but also (in extreme cases) through arson and murder. Wives could not only plead with their abusive husbands in private: they could complain to their neighbours and to the courts; they could seek (or threaten) divorce; and they could threaten (or in extremis inflict) grievous bodily harm. In London, Elizabeth Pepys used all of these strategies in 1668 after she discovered her philandering husband Samuel making love to their 16-year-old servant. After tears, reproaches and ‘ranting’, she threatened to tell their neighbours, to leave him, and even to join the Catholic Church. She also struck Samuel, attacked him with a pair of red-hot tongs and threatened to slit the servant's nose (a popular punishment for adultery). But Elizabeth's most effective weapon lay ‘in matters of pleasure’: she refused to sleep with him. Three weeks after his disgrace, Pepys confided to his diary that he was ‘troubled to see how my wife is by t
his means likely for ever to have her hand over me, that I shall be for ever a slave to her’.4 Only English and Dutch women seem to have enjoyed this limited power to ‘retaliate’, however. Their sisters in other areas of Europe might well ask, like Queen Christina of Sweden in the 1680s, ‘What crime has the female sex committed to be condemned to the harsh necessity of being shut up all their days either as prisoners or slaves? I call nuns “prisoners” and wives “slaves”’.5
Queen Christina would no doubt have felt the same about her female contemporaries in much of Asia, where ‘respectable’ women lived in seclusion from puberty to menopause (a seclusion reinforced in China by the practice of foot-binding: see chapter 4 above). The only exceptions in the Muslim world were the mothers, wives and concubines of Mughal, Ottoman and Safavid rulers, especially during succession disputes. Thus Shah Jahan, who was absent from the Mughal court when his father Jahangir died in 1627, gained the throne only because his female relatives at court took control and outmanoeuvred those who supported other claimants. In the Ottoman empire Kösem, mother of Sultans Osman, Murad and Ibrahim, overthrew several Grand Viziers and even connived in the regicide of 1648, becoming the most powerful person in the state. Such power rarely lasted long: in 1651 Kösem was murdered at the behest of the mother of the new sultan, just as a generation earlier, in Iran, Shah Safi murdered scores of his female relatives because he feared they might try to overthrow him.6
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