Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. By Geoffrey Parker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 904. Paper $30.00. ISBN 978-0300208634.

Abstract

In 2005, the international reinsurance company Munich Re became one of the earliest to offer their corporate and institutional clients protection against the risks resulting from climate change. Notwithstanding political controversy about the scientific consensus on global warming, reinsurers (i.e., insurers of insurance companies) have been making use of climate science, combining it with actuarial science to calculate the short-, medium-, and long-range liabilities of extreme weather in the future. With these looming threats in mind, Geoffrey Parker looks backwards in this panoramic history, but takes a similar approach to analyzing natural and human disasters by drawing on the environmental sciences. Over twenty-two chapters divided into five sections, Parker methodically integrates the "natural archive" (xvi) of material evidence derived from historical climatology (e.g., ice core samples, tree-ring data, volcanic deposits) with the "human archive" (xvii) of more traditional primary sources (official records, diaries, publications, paintings, archaeology), focusing on the anomalous weather of the seventeenth century, mainly across Europe and Asia. During the Little Ice Age, which lasted between roughly 1250 and 1850, glaciers around the North Pole expanded and caused unusually severe weather around the globe. Some of the worst and best-documented conditions occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, which experienced a stretch of exceptionally cold weather from the 1640s through 1690s. Parker examines how societies throughout the world responded-or, more often, failed to respond adequatelyto changing climatic conditions. He argues that Europe's "General Crisis" was a global phenomenon influenced by the direct and indirect consequences of bad weather: poor harvests, dearth, famine, drought, fire, epidemic disease, economic and demographic decline, social unrest, revolts, and ongoing war. While pointing to the frequently crucial role of climate and weather in exacerbating these problems, Parker emphatically rejects environmental determinism. Instead, he attributes the crises to what he repeatedly calls a "fatal synergy" (xxii-xxix) between climatic change and the intransigence of most ruling elites, which together intensified destruction, violence, and suffering. In his judgment, authoritarian Tokugawa Japan was the exception, the only early modern state to "get it right" (the title of chapter 16 is "Getting It Right") by taking effective measures to invest in infrastructure and avoid foreign conflicts. Parker notes that the "dark continents" of the Americas, Africa, and Australia did not experience the global crisis in the same ways, or at least not in ways that he was able to recover using the same methodology. Readers of this journal are likely to be particularly interested in Parker's treatment of the General Crisis and the Thirty Years' War, including Parker's reassessment of his own previous work on these topics. In chapters 8 and 19, weather and climate are loosely correlated with key historical moments. The D...

“The Hardships he labours under... in that severe Climate:” Environment, Seasonality, and British Military Operations in Northern Temperate North America 1756–1814

“…56 However, twenty-first century climate scientists relying on ice core samples and tree rings have developed computer models which show how throughout the eighteenth century "the Northern Hemisphere was subject to protracted winters and abbreviated, cool, and wet summers characteristic of the 'Little Ice Age'." 57 Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, British imperial agents "described the weather in New England and Nova Scotia as comparatively harsh, excessive, extreme, intense, rigorous, bitter and severe." 58 Indeed, Nova "The hardships he labours under… in that severe climate" | 10…”

“The Hardships he labours under... in that severe Climate:” Environment, Seasonality, and British Military Operations in Northern Temperate North America 1756–1814

“…56 However, twenty-first century climate scientists relying on ice core samples and tree rings have developed computer models which show how throughout the eighteenth century "the Northern Hemisphere was subject to protracted winters and abbreviated, cool, and wet summers characteristic of the 'Little Ice Age'." 57 Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, British imperial agents "described the weather in New England and Nova Scotia as comparatively harsh, excessive, extreme, intense, rigorous, bitter and severe." 58 Indeed, Nova "The hardships he labours under… in that severe climate" | 10…”