Global Crisis Read online

  47. The growth of publishing houses in Japan, 1591–1818. Source: Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 296.

  48. Collective violence in Ming China, 1368–1644. Source: Tong, Disorder under heaven, 47.

  49. Universities founded in Europe, 1600–60. Source: H. de Ridder-Simoens, History of the university in Europe. II: early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 98.

  50. Revolts in the Papal States in 1648. Source: Hugon, Naples, 27.

  51. ‘The Great Winter’ of 1708/9. Source: Lachiver, Les années de misère, 274.

  52. An economy of integrated regions. Courtesy Kishimoto Mio.

  53. The conquest of plague in seventeenth-century Europe. Source: Lebrun, Se soigner autrefois, 162–3.

  54. Henry Oldenburg's network of correspondents, 1641–77. Source: Hatch, ‘Between erudition and science’, 57.

  55. Sources of the information used by Newton in Principia Mathematica (1687). Source: Schaffer, The information order, 23.

  1 Sunspot observations by Johannes Hevelius in Danzig, 1644. (See page 13.) Hevelius, a brewer, and his wife noted all the sunspots they observed, and later created composite disks that recorded their movement (in this case between 27 August and 8 October 1644) , a task facilitated by the relative absence of spots between the 1640s and the 1710s. With the insouciance characteristic of the age, Hevelius published these solar observations as an appendix to his book about the moon.

  2 Leonhard Kern, ‘Scene from the Thirty Years War’. (See page 31.) This shocking alabaster sculpture, carved in the 1640s, shows a Swedish officer abducting a young naked woman, presumably to rape her. In preparation, he has tied her hands and presses his blade into her back.

  3 King Charles I exchanges his worldly crown for a crown of thorns. (See page 41.) While in prison, Charles ‘set down the private reflections of my conscience, and my most impartial thoughts, touching the chief passages . . . in my late troubles’, in a book called Eikon Basilike (‘The king’s image’). Printed copies circulated on the day of his execution, 30 January 1649, and 35 English and 25 foreign editions had appeared by year’s end.

  4 ‘Drawing of the city of Edo on 4 March 1657 after the fire’. (See page 63.) Zacharias Wagenaer, a Dutch merchant who had trained as a draughtsman, graphically depicted the desolation caused by the Meireki fire. Dead bodies lie in the street (F), and the castle of the shogun, once the largest edifice in Japan, lies in ruins (A) . Only a few merchant ‘Godowns’ made of stone remain intact (D).

  5 Famine kills: Henan, China. (See page 79.) In his Album of the famished (1688), Yang Dongming, a government inspector, showed how hunger produced suicide. Here, five members of a starving family of seven have hanged themselves from a tree in the garden of the local magistrate whom they blamed for failing to feed them. They leave two young children to fend for themselves.

  6 A baby pleads for good treatment at the Foundling Hospital of Madrid. (See page 100.) ‘My name is Ana'begins the label written by distraught parents when they abandoned their daughter in 1628. It ends: ‘I beg you to entrust me to someone who will look after me. A.’

  7 Weather in China, 1640 and 1641. (See page 126.) Chinese historians of climate have reconstructed the prevailing weather in each of the last 500 years by plotting data from local Gazetteers on a scale from 1 (very wet) to 5 (very dry) . Both 1640 and 1641 emerge as years of extreme drought in northern China and Manchuria, with abnormal precipitation in parts of the south.

  8 A Chinese male undergoes ‘tonsorial castration’. (See page 141.) The Qing edict that all their male subjects must shave their foreheads and wear the rest of their hair in a pigtail provoked widespread opposition not only because it provided unequivocal proof of allegiance to the new dynasty, but also because it required constant repetition. Han Chinese had to re-affirm submission to their conquerors on a regular basis.

  9 ‘The Wine Jew’, Germany, 1629. (See page 220.) A popular print shows the devil guiding a Jewish wine-merchant to Hell. The upper register records the climatic disasters of the previous ‘year without a summer’, linked to a Biblical warning. On the left, vineyards are destroyed by torrential rain (‘He serves you a storm for a punishment’: Psalm 11) and drought (‘I will command the clouds not to rain’: Isaiah 5:6) . In the centre, clouds obscure the sun (‘I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the land’: Amos 8:9).

  10 The ‘salt register’ for Calle Fuencarral, Madrid, 1631. (See page 259.) To enforce its new salt monopoly, the Spanish government pre-printed forms where each head of household had to state his or her name, the size of the household, and how much salt it would buy in the coming year. They then either signed it or (like all these householders) authorized the notary to sign ‘because they do not know how’.

  11 Spanish stamp duty (Papel Sellado) . (See page 262.) Another fiscal innovation introduced by the Spanish government in the 1630s was ‘stamp duty’ payable for official transactions. The recipient of this grant, personally signed by the king (Yo el Rey) , had to pay 272 maravedis to the treasury of ‘Philip IIII, the Great’ for the paper on which it was written.

  12 Philip IV weeps, 7 December 1640. (See page 277.) A consulta from his ‘Executive committee’ concerning rumours of ‘unrest in Portugal’ noted the absence of any news from the duke of Braganca, suggesting that the duke had defected. The tear stains and poor script suggest that Philip lost his self-control as he wrote his response and added his initial (the large ‘J’ at the end).

  13 The British Civil Wars and the Revolt of Bohemia. (See page 324.) The Czech engraver Wenceslas Hollar, a fugitive in England, summarized in images the argument of John Rushworth’s Historical Collections concerning the origins of the Civil Wars. Like Rushworth, Hollar began with the ‘blazing comet’ and defenestration of Prague in 1618 (Q and W, upper right) , leading to the battle of White Mountain (the large right-hand image: X) ; while in Britain the Edinburgh riots (C, top centre) , the pacification of Berwick, the battle of Newburn, the Irish Rebellion (D, G and H, on the large left-hand image) , and Charles’s attempt to arrest the Five Members (I, bottom centre) , combined to produce war.

  14 Rioting against the first use of ‘Laud’s Liturgy’ in Edinburgh, 1637. (See page 334.) Although this crude woodcut implied that only men participated, women took the lead in the rioting that broke out in St Giles Cathedral during the morning service on 23 July 1637.

  15 The earl of Strafford’s impeachment in Westminster Hall, 1641. (See page 344.) Wenceslas Hollar’s engraving shows England’s 70 peers (wearing their hats and robes) surrounded by grandstands where almost 600 members of the House of Commons sit bare-headed. Behind Strafford (standing front centre) over 1,000 members of the public who had purchased tickets listened and watched as the trial unfolded.

  16 ‘Now are ye wilde Irisch as well as wee.’ (See page 350.) One of several graphic illustrations that accompanied later propaganda accounts of how Catholics murdered their Protestant neighbours in the uprising that began on 23 October 1641. Note the reference to ‘the frost & snowe’ – then, as now, a rarity in Ireland.

  17 Selling children for food: Henan Province, China. (See page 403.) Another haunting image from Yang Dongming’s Album of the Famished, shows one of the desperate acts described by observers of the ‘perfect famine’ in Gujarat in 1630–2 as well as in China: in the left-hand panel, a starving mother sells her child for a pot of rice, while on the right other mothers line up to do the same.

  18 ‘The revolt of Masaniello’ in Naples, 1647, by Micco Spadaro. (See page 438.) In one of the earliest European pictorial records of ‘current events’, the young painter Domenico (‘Micco’ for short) Gargiulo (also known as ‘Spadaro’ because his family made swords) depicted what happened in the Piazza del Mercato during the first few days of the Naples revolt. On the left, Masaniello speaks to the crowd, as he did on 7 July 1647, while various groups of his followers (including armed bare-footed boys) mill around him. In the centre, the ‘Epitaph’ displays the naked torso of Don Giuseppe Carafa and the severe
d heads of others who tried to assassinate Masaniello. In the lower centre, Masaniello rides to meet the viceroy in the silver costume he wore on 11 July. The tower of Santa Maria del Carmine, headquarters of the rebels (upper right) , and high-rise apartments dominate the square.

  19 The Massacre of the Pequots at Mystic Fort, Connecticut, in 1637. (See page 450.) The English colonists burst into the palisaded Pequot encampment at Mystic and set fire to ‘The Indians houses’. They then form a circle and use their muskets to shoot down those who try to escape, while a wider circle of their Native American allies wait to kill with their arrows any Pequots who get past the English. Recent archaeological excavations suggest that some 400 Pequots died in the massacre.

  20 Knowledge is power: mapping Edo, capital of Tokugawa Japan. (See page 502.) The central panel of one of the many maps of Edo created from the exhaustive surveys undertaken by the Tokugawa authorities. Edo castle lies at the centre, marked with the trefoil Tokugawa crest in red and gold, surrounded by moats, canals, and rivers, as well as streets, alleys and bridges . all meticulously identified. Temples, shrines, and warehouses are clearly shown; each daimy. complex is identified by names, crests and regalia; commoner residences are left blank.

  21 ‘The Execution of Don Giuseppe Carafa’ in Naples, 1647, by Micco Spadaro. (See page 522.) A striking ‘capriccio’ shows Masaniello, in his fisherman’s overalls and red bonnet, addressing his supporters on 10 July 1647 as they execute and mutilate the noblemen who had just tried to assassinate him. Other members of the crowd wave red flags.

  22 ‘Smoking kills’ (See page 602.) Death, decay and debility dominate the frontispiece to a verse satire by Jakob Balde, S. J., Dry drunkenness, published in Latin in 1657 with a German translation the following year. The vomiting smoker in the centre reminds viewers of some side-effects of the habit; while the skeleton on the right, with smoke pouring out of its eye sockets, leaves readers in no doubt where tobacco use leads. Modern anti-smoking images pale in comparison.

  23 Frontispiece to Grimmelshausen, Abenteurlicher Simplicissimus. (See page 612.) A phoenix, wearing only a sword and bandolier and trampling below its feet several theatrical masks, points to images of war in a book. In an age of limited literacy, images were carefully chosen and this engraving epitomized the message of The adventures of a German simpleton: the Thirty Years War is over; Germany has risen from its ashes.

  24 The Grand Canal at Tianjin, China, 1656. (See page 622.) The ingenious pen of Johannes Nieuhof, secretary of a Dutch embassy to the Qing emperor in 1656, captured the bustling scene as his barge reached the end of the Grand Canal at Tianjin, the ‘staple’ where ‘whatsoever vessels are bound for Peking from any other part of China must touch’.

  25 The General Bill of Mortality for London, 1665. (See page 630.) Burials during the year of the Great Plague are organized both by location (upper register: one column for the total, another for plague deaths) and by cause (lower register) . The different ‘diseases and casualties’ include ‘Abortive and stillborne (617) and suicides (‘Hang’d & made away themselves’ 7) . Overall, burials in 1665 numbered 97,306, an increase over the preceding year of 79,009.

  26 A fire engine in action during a major freeze, Amsterdam, 1684. (See page 636.) Jan van der Heyden, artist, inventor and fire-master, wrote a book – part description, part sales catalogue – about the powerful new fire engines he designed, capable of pumping water from rivers and canals even when they had iced over. He devoted three pages to how they extinguished a fire in a house on a canal in January 1684 (although he kept secret exactly how the engines worked and how he manufactured the hoses).

  27 René Descartes gloats in his study. (See page 649.) The scholar plants his foot disparagingly on one book labelled ‘Aristotle’ as he annotates another – surely not the Discourses of Galileo, which Descartes purchased on its publication in 1638 only to complain: ‘I just spent two hours leafing through it, but I found little there with which to fill the margins’.

  28 ‘A scheme At one View representing to the Eye the Observations of the Weather for a Month’, England, 1663. (See page 661.) Robert Hooke, ‘Curator of experiments’ for the newly founded Royal Society of Great Britain, proposed to its Fellows a method for collecting data for ‘A history of the weather’, mobilizing observers in various stations throughout England. Although the ‘scheme’ came to nothing, the Society’s first historian, Thomas Sprat, considered it worthy of commemoration.

  Prologue

  Did Someone Say ‘Climate Change’?

  CLIMATE CHANGE HAS ALMOST EXTINGUISHED LIFE ON EARTH ON THREE occasions. Some 250 million years ago, a series of massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia caused rapid changes in the earth's atmosphere that wiped out 90 per cent of its species. Next, 65 million years ago, an asteroid struck what is now Mexico and created another atmospheric catastrophe that eliminated 50 per cent of the earth's species (including the dinosaurs). Finally, some 73,000 years ago, the volcanic eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia caused a ‘winter’ that lasted several years and apparently killed off most of the human population.1

  No subsequent environmental disaster has had a global impact on this scale, but several other episodes of climate change have caused widespread destruction and dislocation. About 13,000 years ago, the northern hemisphere experienced an episode of global cooling (probably after a comet collided with the earth), which wiped out most animal life. About 4,000 years ago, societies in south and west Asia collapsed amid general drought; while between AD 750 and 900 drought on both sides of the Pacific fatally weakened the Tang empire in China and the Maya culture in central America.2 Then, in the mid-fourteenth century, a combination of violent climatic oscillations and major epidemics halved Europe's population and caused severe depopulation and disruption in much of Asia.3 Finally, in the mid-seventeenth century, the earth experienced some of the coldest weather recorded in over a millennium. Perhaps one-third of the human population died.

  Although climate change can and does produce human catastrophe, few historians include the weather in their analyses. Even in his pioneering 1967 study, Times of feast, times of famine: a history of climate since the year 1000, Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie averred that ‘In the long term, the human consequences of climate seem to be slight, perhaps negligible’. By way of example, he stated that ‘it would be quite absurd’ to try and ‘explain’ the French rebellion between 1648 and 1653 known as the Fronde ‘by the adverse meteorological conditions of the 1640s’. A few years later Jan de Vries, a distinguished economic historian, likewise argued that ‘Short-term climatic crises stand in relation to economic history as bank robberies to the history of banking’.4

  Historians are not alone in denying a link between climate and catastrophe. Richard Fortey, a noted palaeontologist, has observed that ‘There is a kind of optimism built into our species that seems to prefer to live in the comfortable present rather than confront the possibility of destruction’, with the result that ‘Human beings are never prepared for natural disasters’.5 Extreme climatic events therefore continue to take us by surprise, even if they cause massive damage. In 2003 a summer heatwave that lasted just two weeks led to the premature death of 70,000 people in Europe; while in 2005 Hurricane Katrina killed over 2,000 people and destroyed property worth over $81 billion in an area of the United States equivalent in size to Great Britain. In the course of 2011 over 106 million people around the world were adversely affected by floods; almost 60 million by drought; and almost 40 million by storms. Yet although we know that the climate caused these and many other catastrophes in the past, and although we also know that it will cause many more in the future, we still convince ourselves that they will not happen just yet (or, at least, not to us).6

  Currently, most attempts to predict the consequences of climate change extrapolate from recent trends; but another methodology exists. Instead of hitting ‘fast forward’, we can ‘rewind the tape of History’ and study the genesis, impact and consequences of past catastrophes, using t
wo distinct categories of proxy data: a ‘natural archive’ and a ‘human archive’.

  The ‘natural archive’ comprises four groups of sources:

  • Ice cores and glaciology: the annual deposits on ice caps and glaciers around the world, captured in deep boreholes, provide evidence of changing levels of volcanic emissions, precipitation, air temperature and atmospheric composition.7

  • Palynology: pollen and spores deposited in lakes, bogs and estuaries capture the natural vegetation at the time of deposit.8

  • Dendrochronology: the size of growth rings laid down by certain trees during each growing season reflects local conditions in spring and summer. A thick ring indicates a year favourable to growth, whereas a narrow ring reflects a year of adversity.9

  • Speleothems: the annual deposits formed from groundwater trickling into underground caverns, especially in the form of stalactites, can serve as a climate proxy.10

  The ‘human archive’ on climate change comprises five groups of sources:

  • Narrative information contained in oral traditions and written texts (chronicles and histories, letters and diaries, judicial and government records, ships’ logs, newspapers and broadsheets).

  • Numerical information extracted from documents (such as fluctuations in the date when harvesting certain crops began each year, in food prices, in sunspots observed, or in the number of men paid each spring to steer the detritus that swept down rivers along with snowmelt); and from narrative reports (‘Rain fell for the first time in 42 days’).