Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  17. Viallé and Blussé, The Deshima Registers, XII, 338, records the fire of Feb. 1658; idem, XIII, 7–10, that of 1661, and 247, that of 1668. Viallé and Blussé, The Deshima Registers, XII, 247, on the frequency of fires in Edo.

  18. In July 2010 this ‘core’ from Hitotsubashi was on display in the Edo-Tokyo Museum, Tokyo, which also displayed three illustrations of the Meireki fire, including the one by Wagenaer.

  19. Jones, Porter and Turner, A gazetteer, 13; Stoyle, ‘“Whole streets converted to ashes”’, 141 (Exeter). Allemeyer, ‘“Dass es wohl recht ein Feuer”’, lists fires in other early modern European cities.

  20. Müller, Der schwedische Staat, 237–8 (Mainz); Ogilvie, Germany, 236, 241 (Nuremberg); Sparmann, Dresden, 15; Rizzo, ‘Un economia in guerra’, and idem, ‘“Haver sempre l'occhio all'abbondanza”’ (Pavia); SIDES, La popolazione, 43–7, and Externbrink, ‘Die Rezeption des “Sacco di Mantova”’ (Mantua); and Clark and Lepetit, Capital cities, 205–7 (Warsaw). See also the example of Magdeburg, ch.4 above.

  21. Mote, Imperial China, 800 and 1,036 n. 52, quoting Wen Bing's chronicle of c. 1645 on Kaifeng.

  22. Boyer, La gran inundación; Hoberman, ‘Technological change’; and Gibson, Aztecs, 236–42 and 305–6 (on Mexico); Prieto, ‘The Paraná river floods’ (on Santa Fé); Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine, 406–8 and 441–2, and Garnier, Les dérangements, 85 (on the Seine floods); Gottschalk, Stormvloeden, III, 166–8 (on 1651, with engraving) and 234–55 (with maps). See also Brázdil, Hydrological Sciences Journal, LI/5 (2006), 733–985, a special issue on ‘Historical hydrology’, with many articles on floods in early modern Europe.

  23. Elvin, ‘Market towns’, 446–7, quoting the Gazetteer of Jiading county: for the effects see chs 1 above and 5 above. An official in Zhejiang province voiced similar fears in the 1660s: Nakayama, ‘On the fluctuations’, 77–8.

  24. Mantran, Istanbul, 181; Inalcik and Quetaert, An economic and social history, 179–82; Murphey, ‘Provisioning Istanbul’; Mikhail, Nature and empire, 103–13. On the Egyptian drought, see ch. 7 above.

  25. AHN Consejos libro 1218/118 (extending the pan de registro area, 4 July 1630); and 1229/681 (allocation of bread among the households, 19 Oct. 1644). See also Bernardos Sanz, Trigo castellano.

  26. AMAE (M) Ms 42/7, 11 and 15–16v, Chumacero to Philip IV, 6 Feb. and 20 May 1647.

  27. AHN Consejos 7225/15, council of Castile to Philip IV, 25 May 1647 (no bread on sale in Madrid and emergency purchases in Zamora); Consejos libro 1232/20 (abolition of all exemptions, 23 Feb. 1647), 89 (enforcement of collection, 18 June 1647) and 765 (a petition for a reduction in the new bread quota dismissed with the lapidary phrase ‘No a lugar’ ['No way'], 30 Sep. 1647).

  28. Despite criticisms of the economic model advanced by G. William Skinner (see his articles ‘Marketing’ and ‘Cities’, well summarized by Eastman, Family, 255 nn. 21–23), the ‘macro-region’ concept seems to me more plausible than the ‘centre and periphery’ model of Wallerstein, The modern world-system.

  29. Warde, ‘Subsistence’, 300–1.

  30. Perkins, Agricultural development, 333–44, presents statistics based on over 5,000 dated entries in the ‘water control’ sections of Chinese Gazetteers (out of a total of over 50,000 such entries); Yamamura, ‘Returns on unification’, 331–3, details Japanese projects.

  31. Marks, Tigers, 112 (quotations, both from the Guangdong area in 1625–6).

  32. Bray, Technology and gender, 228–9, quoting a Gazetteer of 1660 about the town of Luzhou; ch 13 above on Gujarat. On the fragile foundations of sugar production in south China, see Mazumdar, Sugar and society.

  33. Mazumdar, Sugar and society, 188–9, and others have argued eloquently that workers in East Asia tended to increase production by adding labour rather than capital; but the production of silk, sugar, cotton and other commercial crops still required far more capital equipment than cultivating rice or wheat.

  34. Kishimoto, Shindai Chûgoku, 29, writing of the early modern Chinese economy.

  35. Van der Capellen, Gedenkschriften, I, 232 (noting also dearth, plague, floods and urban revolts). Data from Snapper, Oorlogsinvloeden, 71; Gutmann, War, 233; and Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic world, 150–2.

  36. Lu, Sources of Japanese history, I, 216–18, prints some of the ‘exclusion decrees’; Tashiro, ‘Foreign relations’, 292–3, gives details on who could trade and who could not. Tashiro Kazui, ‘Tsushima’, 97 n. 33, notes the order for an increase in silk imports via Korea and Tsushima.

  37. HAG Ms 488/13v, viceroy to captain-general of Macao, 17 Apr. 1640 (on the loss of trade); Atwell, ‘Some observations’, 232–3.

  38. Diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch factory, IV, 190–1, entry for 27 Apr. 1640 (on the flight and suicide of Osaka silk traders); HAG Ms 1163/206–7v, asento of the council of finance, Goa, 9 Feb. 1642, on what to do with ‘800,000 taeis de prata corrente pertenhentes aos japões’.

  39. The Qing decision to depopulate the coastal regions of southeast China between 1661 and 1683 offers another example of a human-inflicted economic catastrophe that, in the words of a contemporary, caused ‘the greatest conflagration and havoc the world has ever seen’: Marks, Tigers, 152.

  40. Subrahmanyam, Money and the market, 48, quoting a poem by Mulla Qudrati.

  41. Von Glahn, Fountain of fortune, 176–81, 196–8, 205–6.

  42. Kishimoto, ‘Comments’ at a conference in International House of Japan, Tokyo, 16 July 2010.

  43. Nakayama, ‘On the fluctuation of the price of rice’, 76–7 (quoting a contemporary journal); Kishimoto, ‘The Kangxi depression’, 231, quoting Tang Zhen. Calculation and aphorism from Marks, Tigers, 154–60.

  44. Cervantes Saavedra, Segunda parte de el ingenioso hidalgo Quijote, ch. 20: ‘Dos linajes solos hay en el mundo, como decía una agüela mía, que son el tener y el no tener.’

  45. Weisser, The peasants of the Montes, 38–42.

  46. Hindle, ‘Exhortation’, 119; idem, On the parish, 22–5. The situation improved later: see ch. 21 above.

  47. Gutmann, War and rural life, 165 (St Truiden), 199 (Emael) and 84–6 (tithe receipts from 14 parishes in the Lower Maas valley near Liège and Maastricht). See similar data from Germany in ch. 8 above.

  48. Smith, ‘Benevolent societies’, 325–7; idem, The art of doing good, 97–9, quoting Chen Longzheng.

  49. Spence, Death of Woman Wang, 4–4, and 42 quoting the 1673 county Gazetteer, and Huang Liuhong, Fuhui quanshu [Complete book concerning happiness and benevolence].

  50. Ono, Enomoto Yazaemon, 35; Mortimer, Eyewitness accounts, 77–8, quoting Hans Conrad Lang from near Ulm in 1635; Roupnel, La ville, 31–3 (quoting Girardot de Noseroy, Histoire de dix ans de la Franche Comté de Bourgogne 1632–1642); Mortimer, Eyewitness accounts, 185, quoting Pastor Minck, from near Darmstadt, circa 1650, and 22–3, quoting Sebastian Bürster, a monk living near Überlingen, in 1647.

  Chapter 4 ‘A third of the world has died’

  1. I thank Matthew Connelly, Eve Levin, Pamela McVay and Kenneth Pomeranz for help with drafting this chapter. I also thank Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley for alerting me to the importance of demographic history during my first term of graduate studies in 1965. This chapter concentrates on demographic trends in areas that suffered the full force of the Little Ice Age and General Crisis – basically Europe and Asia. Ch. 15 examines the different demographic experience of Australia, Africa and the Americas.

  2. Jacquart, ‘La Fronde’, 283, on France; Telford, ‘Fertility’, 70–3, and Beatty, Land, 47 and 133 on Jiangnan. See also page 76 above on Tancheng county; and quotations at page 24 above.

  3. John Donne, Devotions, XVII. ‘Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ Kate Epstein reminds me that since Donne wrote these words in 1621–3, years of high mortality in London, he would have often heard bells tolling.

  4. Flinn, Scottish population
history, 130 (petition from the ministers of Orkney to the Privy Council, 1634); Questier, Newsletters, 85, John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, 11 May 1632, together with notes 251–2; Sym, Life's preservative against self-killing, Preface (by William Gouge, a famous Protestant preacher), and 124.

  5. Figures from Macdonald and Murphy, Sleepless souls, 252–3 and 260–7. Nicholas Rodger, who listed the Eastern Circuit Assize Records from the reign of Charles II in the Public Record Office, noted that ‘in the hard years of the mid-1660s both suicide and infanticide rose sharply’. I thank him for sharing this information

  6. Houston, Punishing the dead?, tables 1, 2 and 4; Behringer, Kulturellen Konsequenzen, 259. I thank Rab Houston for pointing out that the increase in recorded suicides may reflect greater ‘visibility’ as well as greater numbers: in times of dearth, a coroner's jury might be more likely to declare a verdict of suicide for (say) a person found drowned in a mill-race.

  7. Details from Meyer-Fong, Building culture, 17–18 (citing the lists of suicides in a 1675 gazetteer).

  8. Fong, ‘Writing from experience’, 269–71. Idem, ‘Signifying bodies’, 116–21, narrates the equally harrowing story of Du Xiaoying, from Hunan, who committed suicide aged 16 after capture by Qing troops. She could have drowned herself at once, she wrote, but first wanted to write her epitaph: her 16 ‘poems on ending life’ formed her last act.

  9. Peterson, ‘The life’ 142. For more on this story, see ibid., 242–3.

  10. Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 64–5 (Liaodong example); Struve, Voices, 31 (two letters from Shi Kefa).

  11. Struve, Voices, 34 (Wang) and 30 (Struve's evaluation). Wang's wife tried to commit suicide twice.

  12. Meyer-Fong, Building culture, 17–18 (quoting from the lists of suicides at Yangzhou in a 1675 gazetteer). More examples in Ho, ‘Should we die?’, 125–36, Mann, Precious records, 25, and Ko, Teachers, 130–5 and 185–7.

  13. Ho, ‘Should we die?’, 136, quoting Qian Xing, Jiashen zhuanxin lu; Spence, Death of Woman Wang, 9 and 14, from the memoirs of Magistrate Huang Liuhong, published in 1694. Elvin, ‘Female virtue’, 128, discusses the 1688 edict. For more on those who committed suicide in the 1640s, and those who did not, see ch. 5 above.

  14. Cherniavsky, ‘The Old Believers’, figure on p. 21. See also ch. 6 above.

  15. Major, Sati, xxviii; Temple, ed., The travels of Peter Mundy, II, 34–6. Banerjee, Burning women, discusses the description of suttee by Mundy and 42 other Western travellers in India 1500–1712, and reproduces seven pictures.

  16. Kolff and van Santen, De geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert, 328 (‘d'welck in Agraa meest 2 a 3 maal des weecks geschiet’: Pelsaert spent much of the 1620s in Agra). The British recorded almost 8,000 immolations in Bengal alone between 1815 and 1828 (the only period any government made a count): Major, Sati, 281–2.

  17. Woods, Death before birth, 218, quoting Guillaume Mauqeste de la Motte, Traité complète des accouchements naturels (1722).

  18. Nedham, Medela medicinae, 54. Miller, The adoption of inoculation, 30–1, and Razzell, ‘Did smallpox reduce height?’, 353–4, quote other contemporaries who thought that smallpox (and measles) became more virulent in the seventeenth century.

  19. Bamford, A royalist's notebook, 23; Chang, ‘Disease’.

  20. Gatta, Di una gravissima peste, 6; Corsini and Delille, ‘Eboli’.

  21. Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española, 71.

  22. Levin, ‘Plague control in seventeenth-century Russia’, citing statistics from a detailed report filed in Dec. 1654 by Treasury Official Kuzma Moshnin; Moote, The Great Plague, 178 and 258–61 (the ‘Bill of Mortality’ for the week listed 7,165 dead, but this excluded burials of those who died without identification or who did not belong to the Church of England).

  23. See the tables in Slack, The impact, 58, and Livi-Bacci, ‘Chronologie’, 433. See similar frequency tables in Kostes, Stom kairo, 366–73 (Balkan Peninsula), and Dols, ‘The second plague pandemic’, 187 (Egypt, Palestine and Syria).

  24. Dunstan, ‘The late Ming epidemics’; Odorico, Conseils et mémoires, 163–81; Amelang, Journal. In Catalonia, the drought that destroyed the harvest in 1650, and therefore drastically reduced the seed corn available for the following harvest, facilitated the devastating plague of 1651.

  25. Foster, The English factories in India, 1630–1632, 165–6, East India Company officials in Surat to their colleagues at Bantam, 8 Sep. 1631; and 178, same to London, 9 Dec. 1631.

  26. Alfani, ‘Plague’, 18, 27 (the database consisted of 124 parish registers in 87 north Italian communities, of which only five escaped at least one plague epidemic in the seventeenth century); SIDES, La popolazione, 86, 110–11 and 253–6.

  27. Ansaldo, Peste, 48 (‘Plus a esté commis …’ on 13 June 1630), and 199–202 (totals).

  28. Amelang, Journal, 40, 50, 58, 61, 68, 62. Pérez Moreda, ‘La peste’, 14–23, presents evidence confirming that women died more frequently, as did almost all who carried the corpses (mostly the mentally retarded and slaves).

  29. Amelang, Journal, 71; Garnier, Les dérangements, Fig. 13, on the drought.

  30. Hastrup, Nature, 234–5; Galloway, ‘Annual variations’, 498–500; Wrigley and Schofield, Population history, 398; Patz, ‘The effects’, 281–9; Cullen, Famine in Scotland, 143–5.

  31. Schaufler, Die Schlacht, 7, quoting General Johann Werth. The Spanish film Alatriste (2006) ends with a moving portrayal of the last stand at Rocroi.

  32. Rodger, The command, 73, quoting an officer who survived the Four Days Battle, which Rodger considers ‘the greatest battle of the age of sail’; 214 (losses); and 101, Commissioner Taylor to Samuel Pepys, Harwich, 4 Apr. 1667 (10 shillings was half a pound sterling).

  33. Hutchinson, Memoirs, 208; Carlton, Going to the wars, 173–9, offers these and other English examples. See also the disturbing case studies of seventeenth-century military violence in Meumann and Niefanger, Ein Schauplatz herber Angst.

  34. Quatre Dialogues de Paysans, 67–8, from L'entre-jeux de Paysans, a short play printed in Liège circa 1635. I thank Myron Gutmann for drawing it to my attention. See some other examples in ch. 2 above.

  35. Ayala, De Iure, 1.2 (Eng. edn, I, 10–11). See also Gentili, De Iure Belli, 3.7 (English edn, II, 320).

  36. Pascal, Pensées ‘Les hommes ne font jamais le mal si complètement et joyeusement que lorsqu'ils le font par conviction religieuse’. On Magdeburg, see Mortimer, Eyewitness accounts, 67–70 (stressing the speed of the destruction); Kaiser, ‘“Excidium Magdeburgense”’; Droysen, ‘Studien’; Cunningham and Grell, Four horsemen, 175–82.

  37. Joshua 6: 21, 24. Hale, ‘Incitement to violence’, notes how frequently those who practised military atrocities justified them from the abundant precedents and injunctions which they found in the Old Testament.

  38. Carlton, Going to the wars, 178–9, quoting contemporary accounts of the siege of Basing House. More atrocities, notably from China, Germany and New England, noted in chs 5, 8 and 15 above.

  39. Abbott, Writing and speeches, II, 127, Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall, 17 Sep. 1649. (Cromwell chose not to explain why his troops had also killed many civilians not ‘in arms’, or why he allowed the slaughter to continue long after ‘the heat of the action’ had passed, especially knowing that most of the defenders were Protestants.)

  40. Data from Lindegren, ‘Men, money and means’, 133, 140–1; idem, ‘Soldatenleben’, 142–3; Jespersen, A revolution from above?, 279–96; and Lappalainen, ‘Finland's contribution’, Fig. 9.

  41. HMC Ormonde, n.s. II, 130–1, Lords Justices to Irish Commissioners, 7 June 1642. See other examples of troops targeting women in ch. 2 above.

  42. Ogilvie, A bitter living, 220–2; Roupnel, La ville, 91–2; Lindegren, ‘Men, money and means’, 156–7; Ailes, ‘Wars, widows’ (noting almost 250 petitions from war widows from five sample years).

  43. Ogilvie, A bitter living, 1 (quoting Catharina Schill, ‘ein arme Frau’ who in 1654 ‘müesse sich seürlic
h nehren’); Rublack, Crimes of women, 144–5.

  44. Hufton, The prospect before her, 81.

  45. Moncada, Restauración, 135–8; Anes Álvarez, Memoriales y discursos de Francisco Martínez de Mata, 219–20; Wrigley, People, cities and wealth, 240.

  46. Hindle, ‘The problem of pauper marriage’; Wrightson, Earthly necessities, 222–3 (drawing on the reconstructions of the Cambridge Population Group).

  47. Mauriceau, The diseases of women with child, 287; Goubert, Beauvais, 48–54.

  48. Galloway, ‘Secular changes in the short-term’.

  49. Capp, When gossips meet, 37. Demographic data suggest that patricians of Geneva and Zurich began family planning in the seventeenth century (von Greyerz, ‘Switzerland’, 134), but they seem to have been unique.

  50. Lee and Wang, One quarter, 10, 99. Note, however, that Lee and Wang derived most of their data from the Lower Yangzi, the southeast and southern Manchuria, where extended families controlled many resources and so had more carrots and sticks with which to influence individual couples than in other regions, where ‘nuclear families’ probably enjoyed greater autonomy. (I thank Kenneth Pomeranz for this point.)

  51. Ko, Teachers, 261–3, describes the female market of Yangzhou and also quotes the poem. Elvin, ‘Female virtue’, 112–14, quotes a similarly revolting poem from Jiangnan about raising daughters explicitly to be prostitutes.

  52. Bray, Technology and gender, 289; Lee, Wang and Campbell, ‘Infant’, 405, 408, 410–11; Lee and Wang, One quarter, 47–51, 98, 107–8.

  53. Waltner, ‘Infanticide and dowry’, 201, quoting the 1625 gazetteer of Fuqing county; Elvin, ‘Unseen lives’, 145–6, poem by Wu Zhao of Jiangxi. Female infanticide was also common in Tokugawa Japan, see ch. 16 above.

  54. Kaiser, ‘Urban household composition’, based mostly on urban household inventories; and Levin, ‘Infanticide’.

  55. Ransel, Mothers of misery, 25, 269–71.

  56. Patin, Lettres, III, 226, to André Falconet, 22 June 1660 (a statistic occasioned by the death of a prominent courtier when she went to a ‘sage femme’ for an abortion). Schiebinger, Plants and empire, 122–4, prints the advice of some seventeenth-century writers on how to carry out abortions; Pollock, ‘Embarking on a rough passage’, 56–8, discusses examples.