Download Global Crisis War Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century Geoffrey Parker 2015300208634 Books

Product details Paperback 904 pages Publisher Yale University Press (October 21, 2014) Language English ISBN-10 0300208634

Global Crisis War Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century Geoffrey Parker 2015300208634 Books Reviews

• After a couple of scattershot chapters it gets into a country by country history and does a major service to the historical discourse by adding in the food production and taxation effects as the events unfolded. It was also fascinating to look across cultures at the same time the Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, and European, amongst others, to see that all faced severe weather related problems, but often reacted differently. Recommended for those who are interested in how human society survived and progressed in a particularly trying century.
• This is a huge and fascinating book about the great crisis of the 17th century. The author is perhaps the greatest living historian of 16th-17th century Iberia, and here he expands his scope to the entire world. He draws connections to the disruptive climate (weather) of the time, one of the temperature troughs in the multi-century Little Ice Age, which is valid, and he avoids overstating his case as most climate warriors seem to do. There are plenty of lessons for today, both climate-related and otherwise (like, tax revolts in France, very current as I write in January 2019). I note that as for climate, all the historical analyses I have seen, including this one, emphasize the bad effects of COOLING, not WARMING. To the extent we expect climate to change (and it is always doing something), we should expect there to be disruptions in human activity, pluses and minuses.
• This is a great work; it will stand as a major history of human beings dealing with multiple crises. I have to disagree with those who say it's "not for the beach" just because it's long. It is so well and compellingly written that it served me well on a long vacation. Infinitely better than those horrible long novels people take with them.
  My one problem is that Dr. Parker does not really prove a case that climate caused the revolutions and wars. He stops a bit short of saying it did. He correlates wars and rebellions with the horrible climate events of the Little Ice Age, but--in a particularly good section of the book--notes that the awful climate events continued well into the 18th century, but the wars didn't. In fact, the 18th century begat the Enlightenment, partly in reaction to all those wars in the 17th. So, in fact, climate problems sometimes go with wars and sometimes go with revolutions and sometimes with neither one. Not much hope of causal chains there.
  In some cases, the wars were predictable long before the climate turned bad. The Ming Dynasty's survival till 1644 was a still-unexplained miracle; it was rotten and tottering by 1550 (or even 1500) and would surely have fallen in the 17th century, climate or no. The religious wars of Europe were also a long time coming; they started in the 1200s with the Albigensian Crusade and got steadily more serious as Protestantism appeared. The climax in the 17th century was fairly predictable.
  So, how much does climate explain? It certainly made people more desperate. It certainly displaced millions, and displaced people have much less vested interest in peace than stably located ones. We will need a lot more studies.
  Of course, Parker is writing with an eye to our current period of rapid climatic change. I expect that we will see either lots of wars or lots of action to stop climate change. Possibly both. Dr. Parker provides a scary scenario of what might happen (again).
• This great book by Geoffrey Parker was for me, as a Dutchman, a real eye opener. We were always taught at school that the 17th century was called Holland’s Golden Century (Gouden Eeuw). But halfway through this century the Dutch Provinces lost their global influence in trade and their society slit into relative poverty. All this happened rather quickly and has been incomprehensible for many. Parker, in a very captivating way, put this global era in a completely new perspective. He not only describes the effects sudden climate change had on society. Like failing crops, there for no food for the population, with the result that 30% of society just starved. The bottom third of the global population was pushed over the cliff. But also describes, in a very fascinating way, how governments and policy makers muddled through this period. Because of their total lack of understanding, information and communication. Today we know more and understand more and we have constant actual information we can communicate instantly. I sincerely hope that today’s governments and policy-makers read this book, so we will do better with the eminent climate change we have on our doorstep today.
• This is a must-read book for anyone interested in or who doubts the effects of climate change. There are some real eye-opening facts in this well-researched, highly readable historical book. The consequences of climate change are laid in in clear, easy to understand sections that cover the span of the globe and how different cultures struggled to deal with the wild swings in weather during the 17th Century. When a dearth of sunspots, coupled with an increase in volcanic activity combined to drop worldwide temperatures by 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. It may not seem like much but simple mathematics show the devastating effects even such apparently small changes can have on food production.
• A massive book that is clearly written and ties The 30 Years War, Plagues, Revolutions around the world, and population crises and crash together. Not a Grand Theory book so much as it is an impressive mining of many sources of data to explain how and why the Western World changed so radically and the Enlightenment and technological developments exploded in the 18th Century.