Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  16. Cavendish, Nature's pictures, 377–8 (from ‘A true relation of my birth, breeding and life’). On Margaret and William in Antwerp, see the magnificent exhibition catalogue by van Beneden and de Poorter, Royalist refugees. Other details from Cavendish, Life; and ODNB s.v. Margaret Cavendish, Sir Thomas Lucas and Sir Charles Lucas.

  17. Haboush, ‘Constructing the center’, 51; Richter, Facing East, 67–8; White, The Middle Ground, ch. 1.

  18. Hagopian, The phenomenon, 123; Bacon, Essayes, 46. Bacon reprinted the essay, with certain changes, in the 1625 edition of his book, quoted here.

  19. Walford, ‘The famines’, part II, 79. In Part I, 521–5, Walford discussed whether sunspots might influence harvests and hoped ‘that the theory will receive the most critical investigation and elucidation’.

  20. Ibid., part II, 217.

  21. Laing, Correspondence, I, 93–8, and 105, Lothian to his father, the earl of Ancram, 19 Oct. 1637 and 8 Nov. 1640 (capitals in the original). The earl added: ‘God's works have beane wrought by fewer then we are.’

  22. BL Harl. Ms. 5,999/29v, ‘Discourse by Henry Jones, Nov. 1643 (more details on climate and catastrophe in both Scotland and Ireland in ch. 11 above).

  23. The threat of starvation may also have prompted Li Zicheng's daring ‘long march’ from Xi'an to Beijing early in 1644; but the destruction of his archives precludes certainty. See also ch. 5 above.

  24. Trotsky, History, II, Introduction, and vol. I, ch. 7 (‘Five Days’). For the origins of the other revolts, see chs 9 and 14 above.

  25. See chs 9 (Barcelona), 14 (Naples and Messina), 6 (Moscow) and 10 (Paris) above. Brinton, Anatomy, 86–8, noted the same phenomenon in the American, French and Russian revolutions.

  26. In addition, the enthusiasm of Kadizadeli and Sufi devotees helped to create the factions that wracked Istanbul (see chs 7 and 18 above). See Brinton, Anatomy, 99–100, on clerics and the American revolution.

  27. Oliver Cromwell, although neither a nobleman nor a king, also founded a dynasty and, had he lived longer, the House of Cromwell rather than the House of Hanover might have replaced the Stuarts.

  28. Brinton, Anatomy, 102, notes the prominence of university graduates among the American revolutionaries in the eighteenth century.

  29. Ibid., 35.

  30. Admittedly all three assemblies eventually lost their struggle: Portugal half a century later, when the inflow of revenue from Brazil enabled the crown to rule without a Parliament; Scotland and Catalonia when military force subjugated them a decade later.

  31. Rebellions that did not gain control of the state's representative assembly normally collapsed relatively swiftly. In Naples, the ‘Serenissima Reale Repubblica’ planned to convene a Parlamento where represents of the 12 provinces of the kingdom could create a common cause, but the Spaniards regained control first; in Denmark and Sweden in 1650 the national Diet secured several concessions from the crown, but then fragmented and so lost them; in France in 1651 an Assembly of Nobles and an Assembly of Clergy forced the regent to summon the States-General of the kingdom but foolishly disbanded before it met (no assembly convened until 1789).

  32. Scriba, ‘The autobiography’, 32. Once again Brinton makes this point eloquently for later revolutions: Anatomy, 122, 134–5, 137–8, 144.

  33. Rushworth, Historical Collections, III part 1, 11–12, the king's speech, 3 Nov. 1640. See also ch. 11 above.

  34. Braudel, The Mediterranean, I, part II, ch. 1, part 1; AGS SP 218/72, consulta of 27 Aug. 1647, reviewing many recent letters from Naples; AGS Estado 2566, n.p., Don Diego de la Torre to Philip IV, 18 Feb. 1648.

  35. Elliott, Revolt, 407.

  36. AGS IG 435 legajo 10/258v–259v, Fernando Ruiz de Contreras orders the Casa de Contratación in Seville to warn the fleet about ‘el accidente de Portugal’, 5 Jan. 1641, minute, and IG 429 legajo 38/177–182v, Philip IV to the viceroy of Peru and others, 7 Jan. 1641, minute. AGI IG 761, n.p., consulta of 27 Dec. 1640 – admittedly, someone endorsed this ‘Luego, luego [At once, at once]’, but noted that the council had delayed advising the king on the correct steps to take ‘until there should be more specific and general information’. By contrast, Madrid sent news of the Catalan revolution to ministers in the New World almost immediately: AGI IG 589 leg. 13, n.p., Register of couriers dispatched to Seville, entry for 12 June 1640: a large packet of letters for American destinations left at ‘4 in the morning’.

  37. One might object that every plot involving numerous participants runs a high risk that someone will betray it (some voluntarily, others involuntarily); yet no one betrayed the intentions of the ‘matrons of the kirk’ to disrupt the first reading of ‘Laud's liturgy’ in 1637, or the plan to restore Portuguese independence three years later.

  38. AMAE (P) CPA 57/314–15, M. de Bellièvre to Secretary of State Brienne, London, 13 Nov. 1648.

  39. Goodare, ‘Debate: Charles I’, 200–1; see also pages 354–8 above. For more on counterfactual protocols, see Tetlock, Unmaking the West, especially the Introduction.

  40. Quotations from Elliott, ‘The year of the three ambassadors’, 181. For more on the character of Charles I, see ch. 11 above.

  41. Starting with ch. 5, Crusoe narrated his experiences according to his ‘Journal’ (Defoe, The life).

  42. Defoe, The life, 286, 262.

  43. Ibid., 152, 58, 79, 170. My reading of the book owes much to Hill, ‘Robinson Crusoe’.

  44. Will, ‘Développement quantitatif’, 868, quoting the decrees of the Kiangxi emperor; Marks, Tigers, 291, quoting Han Liangfu in 1724 and the Yongzheng emperor in 1723. In a note, Will wonders how the emperors became convinced that China had become overpopulated, noting that memoranda from provincial governors on the question ‘reflect imperial preoccupations rather than fuelling them’.

  45. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 597–603.

  Epilogue

  1. Apologies to James Carville, author of the mantra of the successful Clinton–Gore presidential campaign of 1992 ‘It's the economy, stupid’; and thanks to Oktay Özel who, at the panel on the ‘Ottoman General Crisis’ at the XI International Congress of Social and Economic History of Turkey, Ankara, 18 June 2008, suggested that our title should be ‘It's the climate, stupid’. Thanks also to Derrin Culp, Kate Epstein, Daniel Headrick, James Lenaghan and Angela Nisbet, and to Greg Wagman and a group of gifted Honors Students at Notre Dame University for helpful references and suggestions.

  2. I thank Christian Pfister and Martin Parry for sharing with me their recollections of the 1979 conference. Sanderson, The history, 285, notes BP and Shell sponsorship of the Climatic Research Unit, founded in 1971 as part of the University of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences. The Cambridge University Press volume was Wigley, Climate and history.

  3. Report of the World Food Conference, Rome, 5–16 November 1974 (New York, 1975), 6–8 (at FAORLC-41001WorldFoodConference doc, accessed 9 Mar. 2012. Note that in 1981, two years after the University of East Anglia conference, Amartya Sen published his influential Poverty and famines, arguing that famine reflected faulty distribution rather than defective production: see page 108 above.

  4. Houghton, Climate, xi (‘Executive summary’) http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_spm.pdf

  5. http://inhofe.senate.gov/pressreleases/climateupdate.htm Speech by Senator Inhofe in the US Senate, 4 Jan. 2005 quoting with approval his speech on 28 July 2003. In another speech about ‘the most media-hyped environmental issue of all time, global warming’ on 25 Sep. 2006, the senator stated: ‘The media often asks me about how much I have received in campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry. My unapologetic answer is “Not Enough.”’ (http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759).

  6. Text of the Upton-Inhofe Amendment at http://energycommerce.house.gov/media/file/PDFs/ETPA/ETPA.pdf; defeat of the ‘Waxman Amendment’ (6 Apr. 2011) at http://clerk.house.gov/floorsummary/floor.aspx?day=20110406&today=20120310. The attached ‘Roll 236’ i
n this record named the 237 Republicans and 3 Democrats who voted ‘no’ and the 1 Republican and 183 Democrats who voted ‘yes’.

  7. Campbell, ‘Panzootics’, 178. See also his articles ‘Physical shocks’, and ‘Nature’.

  8. Mussey, ‘Yankee Chills’, 442, quoting an unnamed magazine in late 1816, quoting a Barnstead farmer and Bentley. More data in Heidorn, ‘Eighteen hundred’; Post, The last great subsistence crisis, chs 2–3; Stommel, Volcano weather, 28–9 (map of the ‘snow line’ in New England in June 1816) and 83 (prices); and Harington, The year without a summer? (with spectacular fold-out map).

  9. Mussey, ‘Yankee Chills’, 449 (Governor Wolcott of Connecticut) and 451 (statistics: Ohio's population rose from 380,000 to 580,000, and Indiana and Illinois also gained New England refugees). Many Europeans also migrated in 1816–17: to Russia, to South Africa and, above all, to North America Post; The last great subsistence crisis, 97–107.

  10. State of Ohio Homeland Security Strategic Plan (2011), 6, at http://www.publicsafety.ohio.gov/links/Strategic_Plan.pdf, accessed 10 Mar. 2012. The Plan says nothing about the need to ‘vigilantly protect’ the state's water supply.

  11. Although they were entirely predictable, apparently no one foresaw the consequences of a Category 3 hurricane striking a port-city that stands only a few feet above sea level. Likewise, apparently no one foresaw the probability that a Force 9 earthquake and a 46 feet tsunami would not only knock out all power at a nuclear site constructed right beside Japan's Pacific coast, at Fukushima, but also destroy the electrical cables that alone could supply the reserve power necessary to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.

  12. Statistics from 2011 disasters in numbers prepared by the International Disaster Database at the Université Catholique, Louvain, Belgium: www.emdat.be, accessed 12 Mar. 2012. These natural disasters caused many deaths – 36 at Tuscaloosa, almost 200 at Christchurch, over 550 at Joplin and at least 20,000 in northeast Japan – but other recent natural disasters have killed far more: the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and tsunami of 2004 killed over 230,000 people; the Haitian earthquake of 2010 killed over 300,000; and so on.

  13. Nordås and Gleditsch, ‘Climate change and conflict,’ criticize the failure of the IPCC to undertake systematic analysis of historical evidence to show how climate change acts as a ‘threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world’ (p. 628, quoting a 2007 National security and the threat of climate change Report from a panel of retired senior US military officers). Their article introduces a special issue of the journal that contains five articles on the subject. I thank Sharmistha Bachi-Sen of the University of Buffalo for this reference. See also the special issue of Journal of Peace Studies in 2009 on the same subject.

  14. Blake, The deadliest, costliest, and most intense United States tropical cyclones, 5, 6, 25.

  15. Slovic, ‘The perception of risk’, 280, reprinted in his collected essays with the same title.

  16. Israel, The Dutch Republic: its rise, greatness and fall, convincingly attributes the emergence and expansion of the Dutch Republic to the collective solidarity that evolved in the maritime provinces to cope with floods. On the emergence of fire insurance after 1650, see ch. 20 above.

  17. Slovic, The perception of risk, 8, introduction by R. W. Kates.

  18. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110112_globalstats.html, accessed 11 Mar. 2012. The downgrade of global warming to a ‘second-tier issue’ appeared in the Washington Post for 9 June 2011: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-draws-early-fire-from-conservatives-over-views-on-climate-change/2011/06/08/AGkUTaMH_story.html, accessed 11 Mar. 2012.

  19. The authors found that many countries exposed to climate-related natural disasters also have less developed information systems, as well as populations with relatively low levels of education: both factors would further reduce concern about climate change.

  20. In 2005 Televangelist John Hagee and others saw Hurricane Katrina as God's punishment on New Orleans for tolerating such ‘abominations’ as Gay Pride parades and clinics that offer abortions. For earlier ‘peccatogenic’ explanations, see ch. 1 above.

  21. Bankoff, Cultures, 3; Kvaløy, ‘The publics' concern’, based on data collected from the 2005–9 ‘World Values Survey’, quotations from pp. 11, 13–14, and 18. The authors asked respondents how serious they considered not only global warming but also ‘loss of plant or animal species or biodiversity’ and ‘pollution of rivers, lakes and oceans’. Almost everywhere, concern for the last category came top, with global warming either second or last (p. 17). The findings strikingly parallel those of Diamond, Collapse, ch. 14, ‘Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?’

  22. Bankoff, Cultures, 10–13 and 32–3. Natural disasters in the Philippines also occurred in the seventeenth century (ch. 1 above) and led to the creation of the ‘earthquake baroque’ style: buildings specifically designed to withstand seismic shock. For an example, the church at Paoay in northern Luzon, constructed 1694–1710, see http://heritageconservation.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/paoay-church/

  23. Adapting to climate change, 97–8.

  24. ‘Revised statement of principles on the provision of flood Insurance’, July 2008, http://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/flooding/documents/interim2/sop-insurance-agreement-080709pdf

  25. Geneva Association, The insurance industry, 42 and 62–3 (Florida figures updated from Florida, Into the storm, 4). The Geneva Association is a non-profit organization comprising 80 chief executive officers from the world's leading insurance companies.

  26. Geneva Association, The insurance industry, 70; Adapting to climate change, 24.

  27. Florida, Into the storm, 2, 20, 23.

  28. Cock, Hygieine sig. B1v (italics in the original). The author had tried to put his case to a sub-committee of the London council, but was ‘silenc'd’; now he tried again ‘in paper’. Further details from Moote, The Great Plague.

  29. Pepys, Diary, IV, 323–4 (entry for 7 Dec. 1663); Hansard House of Commons Debate, 19 Feb. 1953, speech by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe; Horton, ‘The Thames barrier project’, 248; PRO HLG 145/151. Most of the Thames victims in 1953 died on Canvey Island, land reclaimed in the seventeenth century and provided with sea defences that were unequal to the higher waters three centuries later. It is notable that although the reason why the water level of the Thames had risen remained a mystery to those considering the Thames Barrier, they pressed on because of the fact that it had.

  30. Data from TE2100 Plan consultation document, at ww.environment-agency.gov.uk/static/documents/Leisure/TE2100_Chapter01-04.pdf, accessed 12 Mar. 2012. Similar actions in the Netherlands following the 1953 floods resulted in the world's largest movable flood barrier at the mouth of the river Scheldt – once again, a preventive project so vast that only the central government could achieve it, and one that has thus far averted a repetition of another similar catastrophe.

  31. Brázdil, ‘Floods’, 50; King, Foresight, flood and coastal defence.

  Acknowledgements

  1. E-mail to Robert Baldock, 21 Feb. 1998.

  2. Needham, SCC, I, preface. Needham also quoted Raleigh, History of the World (1614): ‘For all [history], without the knowledge of the places wherein it is performed, as it wants a great part of the pleasure, so it in no way enriches the knowledge and understanding of the reader.’

  3. Richards, The unending frontier, 3.

  Sources and Bibliography

  1. Bisaccione, Historia; Birago Avogadro, Delle historie memorabili. Burke, ‘Some seventeenth-century anatomists of revolution’, surveys these and the other ‘crisis’ authors (two-thirds of them Italians, and one-quarter writing in 1647 and 1648). Voltaire, Essay on the customs and character of nations (see page 1 above).

  2. Aston, Europe in Crisis; Elliott, ‘The General Crisis’; and Merriman, Six contemporaneous revolutions. See also the historiographical discussions in Chaunu, ‘Réflexions’; Parker, Europe's seventeenth-century crisis; Villari, ‘Riv
olte’; Wallerstein, ‘Y-a-t-il une crise?’ Te Brake, Shaping history, ch. 4; Dewald, ‘Crisis’; Bitossi, ‘Gli apparati statali’; Bilbao, ‘La crisis’; Koenigsberger, ‘The General Crisis’; and a special issue of the journal Manuscrits, IX (1991), ‘Europa i Catalunya el 1640’.

  3. Revue d'histoire diplomatique, XCII (1978), 5–232; Hroch and Petráň, Das 17 Jahrhundert – Krise der Feudalgesellschaft? (first published in Czech in 1976); Renaissance and Modern Studies, XVI (1982), 1–107.

  4. Modern Asian Studies, XXIV (1990), 625–97, mostly reprinted in the 1997 edition of Parker and Smith, General Crisis.

  5. Goldstone, Revolution and rebellion; Romano, Conjonctures opposés; Ogilvie, ‘Germany’; AHR, CXIII (2008), 1,029–99 (‘The General Crisis of the seventeenth century revisited’); JIH, XL (2009), 145–303 (‘The Crisis of the seventeenth century: interdisciplinary perspectives’) – Rabb quoted from p. 150.

  6. The depositions are available at <1641.tcd.ie>. See also the essays in Darcy, The 1641 depositions. ‘State Papers Online’ provides to institutional subscribers (only) the entire archives of the Tudor and Stuart governments.

  7. Ohlmeyer, ‘The Antrim Plot’, 912, Lord Antrim to Hamilton, 13 July 1639; Scott and Bliss, The works of William Laud, VII, 211, Laud to Wentworth, 30 Nov. 1635; Struve, Ming-Qing conflict, 32.

  8. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Naissance’, pays tribute to Garnier's influence. In a conversation in February 2012, Le Roy Ladurie assured me that he had played down the climate-catastrophe connection in his 1967 book, ‘because no one then would have believed me’.

  9. Fleury and Henri, Des registres paroissiaux; Wrigley and Schofield, The population history; Hayami, The historical demography. See also Rosental, ‘The novelty’, and Séguy, ‘L'enquête’.

  Bibliography