1668 Spain recognizes independence of Portugal and its empire 1668
1669 Venice and the Turks make peace Dutch and allies defeat Makassar X 1669
1670 Revolt of Stenka Razin → 1671 1670
1671 Portuguese and allies destroy Ndongo 1671
1672 Ottoman attacks on Poland → 1676; French attack Dutch Republic, leading to regime change and war →1678 1672
1673 ‘Revolt of the Three Feudatories’ in China → 1681 V5 1673
1674 1674
1675 ‘Red bonnet’ revolt in Brittany ** Year without a Summer 1675
1676 King Philip's War (New England); Bacon's rebellion (Virginia) 1676
1677 Ottoman-Russian war → 1681 1677
1678 1678
1679 1679
1680 V5
comet 1680
1681 ‘Revolt of the Three Feudatories’ ends 1681
1682 Moscow rebellion →1684 Last major comet of the century 1682
1683 Ottomans war against Habsburgs and Poland (and Venice from 1684) → 1699 Qing troops take Taiwan and permit maritime trade again ** 1683
1684 First visit by a Qing ruler to southern China X 1684
1685 1685
1686 Drought in India & Indonesia → 1688 1686
1687 X 1687
1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England; Louis XIV starts war with Britain, Dutch, Spain and Empire (to 1697) 1688
Sources
• Sunspot chronology from Usoshin, ‘Reconstruction’ modified by Vaquero, ‘Revisited sunspot data’.
• El Niño chronology from Gergis and Fowler, ‘A history of ENSO events’
• Volcanic chronology from the Smithsonian Institution's site http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/largeeruptions.cfm
I have omitted two other major eruptions in the Smithsonian series because of imprecise dating: one V6 between 1640 and 1680 and another V4 between 1580 and 1680.
Acknowledgements
In February 1998, I suddenly decided I wanted to write this book, and I immediately sent an e-mail to Robert Baldock, then editing my Grand Strategy of Philip II at Yale University Press, with the news:
I always thought that the idea of my next book would come to me quite unexpectedly. Last night I awoke at 4 AM and realized that I wanted to write a book about the General Crisis of the seventeenth century – not a collection of essays (been there, done that) but an integrated narrative and analytical account of the first global crisis for which we possess adequate documentation for Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. My account would adopt a Braudelian structure, examining long-term factors (climate above all), medium-run changes (economic fluctuations and so on) and ‘events’ (from the English Civil War and the crisis in the French and Spanish Monarchies, through the murder of two Ottoman sultans, the civil wars in India and sub-Saharan Africa to the collapse of Ming China and the wars around the Great Lakes of North America). Besides examining each of the upheavals of the mid-century, the book would offer explanations of why such synchronic developments occur with so little warning and why they end. Although not the first ‘general crisis’ known to historians, it is the first one for which adequate data exists worldwide. Since it addresses issues of concern today – the impact of global climatic change and sharp economic recession on government and society – it should not lack interested readers.1
Although I had thus anticipated much of the structure of this book at the outset, I had no idea then how much travel it would take to research and how much time it would take to write. I should have known better. In the introduction to Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham warned: ‘There is no substitute for actually seeing for oneself in the great museums of the world, and the great archaeological sites; there is no substitute for personal intercourse with the practising technicians themselves.’ Needham followed this advice meticulously: he filled his magnificent multi-volume work with personal observations and testimony gathered during more than forty years of travel in China and around the world. He also selflessly furthered the work of students, and built on their achievements.2 In researching my far more modest enterprise I have tried to follow Needham's precept and example. I have travelled extensively both to see for myself the places affected by the mid-seventeenth-century cataclysm and to consult ‘the practising technicians’ there who share my interest in them. Above all, I have tried to further the research of students and now I build on their achievements: I am particularly indebted to Lee Smith, with whom I edited a collection of essays on the subject (The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, London 1978; revised edition 1996); and to Tonio Andrade, Derek Croxton, Matthew Keith, Pamela McVay, Andrew Mitchell, Sheilagh Ogilvie, William M. Reger IV and Nancy van Deusen, all of whom graciously shared with me the fruits of their research on the seventeenth century.
Unfortunately, I lack Joseph Needham's dedication to languages (he started to teach himself Chinese at age 38) and, in any case, as John Richards (another pioneer of ‘big history’) observed, ‘In the best of all worlds, the author would be proficient in a half-dozen more languages’.3 I have therefore relied extensively on the skills of other colleagues and mentors. It is a particular pleasure to recall the assistance of Hayami Akira, who introduced me both to the wealth of surviving material on early modern Japanese history and to his extensive circle of erudite colleagues. I have learned more than I can say from him, and from Mary Elizabeth Berry, Phil Brown, Karen Gerhard, Iwao Seiichi, Ann Jannetta, Derek Massarella, Richard Smethurst and Ronald P. Toby, on the history of Japan. I am grateful for enlightenment to many other experts on seventeenth-century history: on China, to William S. Atwell, Cynthia Brokaw, Chen Ning Ning, Roger Des Forges, Nicola Di Cosmo, Kishimoto Mio, Joseph Needham, Evelyn S. and Thomas G. Rawski, Shiba Yoshinobu, Jonathan Spence, Lynn A. Struve, Joanna Waley-Cohen and Wang Jiafan; on Africa, to James de Vere Allen, John Lonsdale and Joseph C. Miller; and on South and Southeast Asia to Stephen Dale, Ashin das Gupta, Michael Pearson, Anthony R. Reid, Niels Steensgaard, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and George Winius. Dauril Alden, Nicanor Domínguez, Shari Geistberg, Ross Hassig, Karen Kupperman, Carla Pestana and Stuart Schwartz guided my steps towards relevant sources on the Americas; while Paul Bushkovitch, Chester Dunning, Robert Frost, Josef Polišenský, Matthew Romaniello and Kira Stevens did the same for Russia and Eastern Europe; as did Nicholas Canny, David Cressy, Jane Ohlmeyer and Glyn Redworth for Britain and Ireland; and Günhan Börekçi, Jane Hathaway and Mircea Platon for the territories formerly in the Ottoman empire. Yet more of my debts are acknowledged with gratitude in individual chapters. On the ‘big picture’, I owe much to the advice and inspiration of Jonathan Clark, Karen Colvard, Robert Cowley, Jack A. Goldstone, Richard Grove, Joe Miller, Paul Monod, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Kenneth Pomeranz, Nicholas Rodger, Lonnie Thompson and Joel Wallman.
For vital assistance in acquiring and interpreting foreign-language sources I thank Alison Anderson (German); Bethany Aram (Spanish); Maurizio Arfaioli (Italian); Günhan Börekçi (Turkish); Przemysław Gawron and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk (Polish); Ardis Grosjean-Dreisbach (Swedish); Mary Noll and Matthew Romaniello (Russian); Mircea Platon (Romanian); Taguchi Koijiro and Matthew Keith (Chinese and Japanese); and Věra Votrubová (Czech and German). I also thank Peter Davidson for graciously making available to me his transcript of Aberdeen University Library, Ms 2538, the ‘Triennial travels’ of James Fraser, an Aberdeen University student.
A six-week stay at the International House of Japan in spring 2002 provided a wonderful opportunity to familiarize myself with materials concerning the crisis in East Asia, by speaking with other scholars in residence and then following up their suggestions in the western language materials available in its library. I started writing this book in a room overlooking its magnificent ‘samurai’ gardens, and completed the last phase of my research there on another visit in July 2010. I thank the community of I-House for their welcome, support and suggestions.
The cost of ‘actually seeing for oneself’, in East Asia and else
where, has increased prodigiously since Joseph Needham began his work, and my research would have been impossible without generous and prolonged financial support. I thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japanese Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Scottish Universities and the British Academy for grants; and the Harry Frank Guggenheim and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundations for fellowships. I also thank the eight universities where I have taught over the past four decades for their support of my research on this and earlier related projects: namely Cambridge, St Andrews, Keio, British Columbia, Illinois, Oxford, Yale and, above all, Ohio State, where almost all the final planning and writing of this book took place. The sustained support of OSU's History Department and Mershon Center proved crucial in three areas: funding a course of lectures on the World Crisis, a succession of graduate research assistants, and prolonged periods of research abroad. The lectures given at the Mershon Center in 2001 by William Atwell, Paul Bushkovitch, Jack Goldstone, Richard Grove, Karen Kupperman, Anthony Reid, Stuart Schwartz and Joanna Waley-Cohen, and the discussions with them and my graduate seminar that followed, inspired and informed me as I started writing. Later on, their willingness to answer queries and to pass on references expanded my horizons and saved me from many mistakes.
The OSU graduate research assistants funded by the Mershon Center and the History Department helped me both to manage the material generated by this project and to maintain my enthusiasm. I thank Katherine Becker and Matthew Keith (both of whom also helped to organize the World Crisis lecture series), Günhan Börekçi, Andrew Mitchell and Leif Torkelsen. I also thank two other graduate students for their research assistance: Megan Wheeler in Oxford, and Taguchi Koijiro in Tokyo. Thanks to their help I completed the first draft of this book in July 2007 and sent it to three expert readers: Paul Monod, Kenneth Pomeranz and Nicholas Rodger. They, as well as four other anonymous Press ‘readers’, provided me with magnificent advice, almost all of which I eventually followed.
Other commitments prevented me from implementing this advice until 2010, when Rayne Allinson, Sandy Bolzenius, Kate Epstein and Mircea Platon (all at The Ohio State University) suggested numerous further improvements that inspired me to get back to work on the project. I am immensely grateful to all four of them for their friendship, guidance and encouragement as I strove to implement their suggestions – but especially to Kate, who started to send me comments, encouragement, and references in May 2006 and continued until the book went to press. I have also been very lucky in my editorial team at Yale University Press – Robert Baldock, my friend and publisher for 35 years; and Candida Brazil, Tami Halliday, Steve Kent, Rachael Lonsdale and Richard Mason, all of whom made wonderful suggestions and saved me from numerous errors. I am grateful to all of them for their expertise and their patience. Finally, I thank my four wonderful children – Susie and Ed, Richard and Jamie – and Alice Conklin for the love they have brought, and continue to bring, into my life.
Columbus–Oxford–Tokyo–Paris, 1998–2012
Conventions
1. All dates given are New Style, even for European countries like Britain, Sweden and Russia that did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until later – although, since histories of these countries normally use Old Style, I provide key dates in both forms. I have also converted all dates from Chinese, Islamic, Japanese and Jewish systems of reckoning time to the Gregorian calendar.
2. Where a recognized English version of a foreign place-name exists, I have used it (thus Brussels, Vienna, Moscow, Tokyo); otherwise I have preferred the style used today in the place itself (thus Bratislava and not Pressburg or Pozsony; Lviv and not Lwów or Lemberg). Likewise, with personal names, where an established English usage exists I have adopted it (Gustavus Adolphus, Philip IV). In all other cases, I have used the style and title employed by the person concerned.
3. I have used Pinyin rather than Wade-Giles Romanization for Chinese (except when quoting from a work that uses Wade-Giles); and I have given the family name first for all Japanese, Chinese and Turkish persons, past and present (thus Tokugawa Iemitsu, Hayami Akira and Kadizade Mehmet).
4. All italics, unless otherwise stated, are my emphasis.
Sources and Bibliography
Attempts by historians to understand and explain the wave of political, social and economic upheavals that swept the northern hemisphere in mid-seventeenth century began immediately. More than 30 accounts of individual rebellions appeared in print between 1643 and 1663; while, between them, The history of the civil wars of these recent times by Maiolino Bisaccione (1652), and Memorable histories, containing the political uprisings of our times by Giovanni Battista Birago Avogadro (1653), described the ‘troubles’ in Brazil, Britain, Catalonia, France, Moscow, Naples, the Papal States, Poland, Portugal, Sicily, Switzerland and the Ottoman empire. A century later, Voltaire linked the political upheavals of Europe with those in Asia and Africa, postulating for the first time that a global crisis had occurred.1
Comparative studies of the phenomena largely ceased until 1937, when Roger B. Merriman delivered a lecture entitled ‘Six contemporaneous revolutions’. Merriman claimed that his subject ‘has fascinated me for more than thirty years’, and although he adopted a far narrower focus than Voltaire (looking only at western Europe, and even then only at six ‘anti-monarchical rebellions’ during the 1640s), he considered their common ‘parallels and philosophies’, stressed the ‘cross currents’ that linked them, and compared them with the European revolutions of 1848. Then the historiographical trail went cold again until the 1950s, when the English historians Eric Hobsbawm and Hugh Trevor-Roper launched a debate on what they called ‘The General Crisis of the seventeenth century’ with long articles published in the journal Past & Present: A Journal of Scientific History. In 1965 the journal's editor, Trevor Aston, republished them, together with five essays on England and case studies on France, Spain, Sweden and Ireland, in Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660. Five years later, Robert Forster and Jack Greene published the proceedings of a symposium on the subject, Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe, with case studies of rebellions in the 1640s in France, England and the Spanish Monarchy. Much later, ‘as a survivor’ of ‘those dramatic days in the 1950s and 1960s’ John Elliott published a magisterial overview of both the debate and the protagonists: ‘The General Crisis in retrospect’.2
In 1968 Elliott gave an influential lecture entitled ‘Revolution and continuity in early modern Europe,’ which sought common denominators for the events of the 1640s, and also compared them with other ‘waves’ of resistance in early modern Europe. A decade later, this and other articles on the subject published since Aston's Crisis in Europe appeared in Parker and Smith, The General Crisis of the seventeenth century; while a special issue of the journal Revue d'histoire diplomatique published studies of nine ‘contemporaneous’ revolts in western European (Portugal, Spain, England, Ireland, Spanish Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, Sweden, the Swiss cantons, and Lübeck). In 1976, Miroslav Hroch and Josef Petráň synthesized East European historical data and literature; while six years later, the journal Renaissance and Modern Studies published a special issue on ‘“Crisis” in Early Modern Europe’ with eight more case studies from Europe, and Perez Zagorin, Rebels and rulers, 1500–1800, included case studies of over a dozen more.3 The 1975 essay by Theodore Rabb, The struggle for stability in early modern Europe, looked not only at the crisis but also at its aftermath; and in 1999 Francesco Benigno, Specchi della rivoluzione, discussed the literature on the European upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, and reviewed the vast historiography on the Fronde and on the revolt of Naples in detail.
The debate resumed a global perspective with a panel on ‘The General Crisis in East Asia’, held at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Asian Studies, and published the following year in Modern Asian Studies (with essays by John Richards, William Atwell, Anthony Reid and Niels Steensgaard).4 In 1991, Jack A. Goldstone's Revolution and rebellion in
the early modern world systematically compared the contemporaneous state breakdowns in Stuart England, the Ottoman empire and Ming China. The following year, Ruggiero Romano's Conjonctures opposées presented data that linked the economic difficulties in both Europe and the Americas; while Sheilagh Ogilvie's essay ‘Germany and the seventeenth-century crisis’ provided the most satisfactory explanation to date of the crisis in western Europe. Finally, in 2008–9, two of the leading United States historical journals devoted special issues to the subject. It is hard to disagree with Theodore K. Rabb, who wrote in his Introduction to one collection: ‘Like it or not, the Crisis seems here to stay.’5
With few exceptions, all works on the crisis relied almost exclusively upon political and economic sources. This is understandable, since the quantity of surviving manuscript and printed seventeenth-century material is almost overwhelming. For example, a census of accounts of the Naples revolution of 1647–8 held just in the libraries and archives of the city of Naples revealed almost 300 manuscripts, most of them written by contemporaries. In addition, over 20 printed contemporary accounts exist, as well as vivid paintings by a local artist, Micco Spadaro, that depict several leading episodes. So many descriptions of the contemporaneous rebellion of Fermo in central Italy have survived that one can follow its progress almost hour by hour. In England, the almost 400 extant accounts of the battle of Naseby in 1645 enable historians to reconstruct the action almost minute by minute. Despite this profusion, several important sources only came to light relatively recently: in the 1930s the papers of Samuel Hartlib and his circle were discovered in a London solicitor's office; in the 1970s the Chinese government opened the archives of the victorious Qing to researchers; and so on. Furthermore, many sources previously available in a single archive can now be consulted online. Perhaps the most spectacular example are the 20,000 pages of ‘Depositions’ dictated by over 3,000 Protestant survivors of the Irish rebellion in 1641, which have now been scanned, transcribed and indexed so that it is possible to ‘search’ for common denominators as well as for individuals. Other important examples include the entire ‘State Papers’ series in the Public Record Office in London, and the Hartlib papers at Sheffield University, both now available online.6
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