Global Crisis

“Big Data” is a current buzzword in the software industry, but its popping up all over, and turning out to be at least as useful in the humanities as in the business world.

Using computers to store, organize, search, filter and sort the historical record is an art still in its infancy, but it is already bearing fruit. Geoffrey Parker's “Global Crisis” is almost certain from the tree of Big Data: the depth, breadth and complexity of analysis would simply not have been possible without advances in modern technology.

That said, this is not a dry book of numbers. Parker brings to life the people and the times, examining the crisis from as many perspectives as possible. It is very clear from the data that the climate crisis of the 17th century was indeed global: it was not some minor aberration restricted to Western Europe, unless events in Western Europe caused crop failures and historic-record weather events in China during the Ming-Qing transition.

As much as one third of the human population died in the 17th century, which saw massive sequential crop failures at different times all over the world, and lacking global trade there was no way to move food from unaffected to affected areas. Until global capitalism really got its feet under the table in the 20th century there was simply no way for humanity to address a crisis of this magnitude.

Records–including official, personal, and natural–across the world show that between 1620 and 1680 there were extreme climate events at far higher frequency than in any other period of human history, and political responses to them were almost uniformly wrong-headed, favouring top-down dictatorial absolutism over distributed democratic control. The abject failure of top-down absolutism on every front set the stage for the more pluralistic, tolerant modern world, where global capitalism eventually was able to do what no other economic system anywhere ever was able to do: actually generate enough wealth to feed the entire human population, and relegate famine to causes solely political, generally caused by partisan absolutists, both Marxist and Fascist.

The book is magesterial in scope and extremely long, clocking in at almost 1000 pages with several hundred pages of references and notes. The same events are covered from multiple perspectives, which does allow a certain amount of skimming, but the insights come thick and fast. Contingency is emphasized, but it's hard to argue with statistics: of the dozens of revolutions that promised to “change everything” in the 17th century, exactly one succeeded, the revolt of Portugal against Spain. From this, we can reasonably conclude that anyone who suggests the appropriate response to any modern crisis is a revolution that “changes everything” is either an historical ignoramus or a flipping idiot. Possibly both.

It's also fascinating how the same dysfunctional impulses affected both governments and revolutionaries the world over. Governments became more authoritarian (because that always works so well) while revolutionaries not only focused on egalitarianism, they actually used the same terms (“Levelers” in England, “Leveling Kings” in China) to describe themselves. Unsurprisingly, the leveling impulse was as pointless and stupid as the authoritarian impulse it opposed.

Human economies are highly dependent on relatively stable background conditions. In the face of the global climate instabilities–partly due to volcanoes, partly due (probably) to the Maunder solar minimum, partly due to internal feedbacks–the global economy of the 17th century faltered, and huge numbers of poeple died.

Today we plausibly face a similar period of unstable climate, mostly due to human activity, and particularly thanks to the successes of anti-nuclear activists in the 70's and ‘80's, who did everything they could to ensure it was impossible to replace base-load coal with safe, clean, efficient modern nuclear power plants. Although thanks to our integrated global capitalist economy we should be much more robust agasint climate change than the 17th century was, we are still likely going to face hardships, and this book will give a sense of the kinds of things that we know can and do happen, because they have happened before.