Book Review
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, Yale University Press, 2014, 904 pages.
Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan
This book is about a time of climate disasters, never-ending wars, economic globalism complete with mass human migration, imbalances, and subsequent social strife—a period characterized by unprecedented scientific advances and backward superstition. In other words, it is a world survey about the web of events known as the 17th century. Although I bought it in paperback a number of years ago, I recently found a mint condition hardback copy of this magisterial tome by master historian, Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge, St. Andrews, Yale, etc.), and felt compelled to write about it, however briefly. I am drawn to this century because of its contrasts as the one that straddles the transition from the Early Modern to the Age of Reason and Enlightenment and more broadly marks the final shift from Medieval to Modern (even before Salem colonists hanged their neighbors suspected of witchcraft, Leibniz and Newton had independently begun to formulate the calculus).
In 1959, British historian H. R. Trevor-Roper, presented the macro-historical thesis of the “General Crisis” or the interpretive premise characterizing the 17th century as an overarching series of crises from horrible regional wars (e.g. the Eighty Years War, the Thirty Years Wars, the English Civil War and its roots and spillover into Scotland and Ireland) and rebellions, to widespread human migration and the subsequent spread of disease, any number of epidemics, global climate change, and a long litany of some of the most extreme weather events in recorded history (e.g. the Little Ice Age). When I was in graduate school, I had intuited this premise on my own (perhaps after reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, about the “Calamitous 14th Century”), but was hardly surprised to discover that Trevor-Roper had scooped me by 40 years.
Parker has taken this thesis and generalized it in detail beyond Europe to encompass the entire world to include catastrophic events and change throughout the Far East, Russia, China, India, Persia, the greater Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Others, including Trevor-Roper himself, also saw these in terms of global trends and scope, but, to my knowledge, Parker’s book is the fullest and most fleshed-out treatment. It is academic history, but is well-written and readable for a general audience. It is well-researched history on a grand scales. For Western historians, such as myself, the broader perspective is eyeopening and suggestive of human commonality rather than divergence. We are all a part of an invasive plague species and we are all victims of events, nature, and our own nature.
Although I am generally skeptical of macro interpretive premises that try to explain or unify everything that happened during a period under a single premise—i.e. the more a theory or thesis tries to explain, the more interesting and important, but the weaker is usually is as a theory and therefore the less it explains (call it a Heisenberg principle of historiography)—this one is on to something, at least as description. The question(s), I suppose, is the degree to which the events of this century, overlapping or sequential in both geography and time, are interconnected or emerge from common causes or if they were a convergence of factors both related and discrete, or rather is the century a crisis, a sum of crises, or both? Correlation famously does not establish causation. To those who see human history in the broadest of terms—in terms of of the environment, of humankind as a singular prong of biology, and therefore of human history as an endlessly interesting and increasingly tragic chapter of natural history—this book will be of special interest.
In college I was ambivalent about the 17th century. More than most centuries, it was an “in between times” period, neither one thing, nor the other. All periods are artificial and intermediary, but the 17th century seemed especially artificial given the fundamental advances and shifts in intellectual history that occurred in the Europe between 1601 and 1700. In the West, the 18th century seemed like a coherent, unified world, the Newtonian paradigm. But the 17th century was a demarcation, a caldron from which the world of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason emerged. The 18th century was the sum and creation of the previous century, a world unified under Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, and many others, and today I find the earlier period to be the more interesting of the two. This book only feeds this belief.
As someone who thinks that one of the most important and productive uses of history is to inform policy and politics, it is apparent that the author intends this book to be topical—a wide-angle yet detailed survey of another time, for our time. In general the 17th century is good tonic for those who believe that history is all sunshine and light or that human progress (such as it is) is all a rising road. It is also serves as cautionary example for what may be coming in our own time. A magnum opus of breathtaking breadth and ambition, this book is certainly worth looking at (don’t be put off by its thickness, you can pick it up at any point and read a chapter here or there).