The earth transformed, p.52
The Earth Transformed, page 52
In the 1630s, however, greater emphasis was placed on Islamic features, with Agung abandoning the Javanese calendar and its anchor around the lunisolar Śaka year for the Islamic lunar year, sponsoring patronage of Qurʾānic teaching and making great play of the importance of pilgrimages. While this may have derived from Agung’s own evolving beliefs, it is striking that it followed on from a series of uprisings centred on a group of villages in central Java and above all on the holy site of Tembayat.105 It is tempting, therefore, to associate the suffering of the early 1630s with the need to win over starving and restive populations with conciliatory measures; after all, turbulence of all kinds can be a powerful motivation for seeking explanations and finding solutions.106
The effects of these patterns were global, with an estimated 30 million perishing from hunger and related causes around the world before more normal conditions returned in the mid-1630s. The flooding of Potosí in South America forced the suspension of mining activities, while cataclysmic flooding in Mexico between 1629 and 1634 left fields saturated, washed away nutrients and made it almost impossible to travel, let alone transport goods and foods.107 In Europe, 1628 was another ‘year without a summer’, with snow falling in Switzerland twenty-three times in the Bernese Oberland, crop failures and a notable rise in the number of witch hunts and accusations of sorcery in the Alps and Rhine basin.108
Far more damaging, however, were war and disease which decimated populations, transformed societies and had consequences that lasted for centuries. Wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics overwhelmed much of continental Europe in what became known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), a time of furious, sustained conflict and suffering. The 1630s onwards saw the start of fierce fighting between Spain and France that lasted for more than twenty years, while England was ravaged by civil war for most of the following decade. The 1640s were brutal, a time of constant unrest, suffering and turbulence within as well as between states. There were revolts and uprisings ‘everywhere in the world, for example in France, England, Germany, Poland, Muscovy and the Ottoman empire’, noted the Swedish diplomat Johan Adler Salvius, who was at a loss to understand the rise in violence. Perhaps ‘this can be explained by some general configuration of the stars in the sky’, he suggested – musings that were shared by others around the same time.109
To make matters worse, plague took hold, spreading from northern France in 1623 to England, the Low Countries and Germany before reaching Italy in 1629–30. Mortality rates were particularly high in major cities in northern Italy with around 30 to 35 per cent of the population of that region – some 2 million people – dying from plague.110 The effects of war and disease were even more severe in the territories of the Holy Roman empire, with demographic declines of 35 to 40 per cent.111 The dual effects of conflict and plague were so great that they impacted inequality into the eighteenth and perhaps even into the nineteenth century. Had Germany not had these experiences, it would probably have followed trends elsewhere and become much more unequal. While this made Germany more egalitarian, it also meant it was on the wrong side of economic divergence in Europe that left it having to play catch-up from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.112
The outcome was equally bad in Italy, especially when further waves of plague struck in the 1650s and led to around a million deaths in the kingdom of Naples – or somewhere between 30 and 43 per cent of the population. This was dramatically worse than north-western Europe, where plague intensity led to the deaths of around 8–10 per cent of the population in England and marginally higher in France. Plague did enormous damage in Italy because it struck so quickly and because its decimation of the urban workforce brought about shocks to production capabilities – and because deaths among elites in cities like Venice and Genoa who organised and invested in long-distance trade had material impacts on short- and long-term economic fortunes.
But perhaps most important of all was timing: plague struck at the worst possible moment, at a time when manufacturers were facing intense and rising competition from countries in northern Europe. In this sense, the disparity in mortality rates between north and south was crucial, as it allowed the former not only not to suffer but left it in a position to capitalise on its emerging advantages.113 This was a crucial staging post in the Little Divergence – the point where northern Europe caught up with, then overtook and pulled away from the south. By 1650, English wages were 10 per cent higher than those in Italy; by 1800, they had risen to a staggering 150 per cent higher.114
These changes were not due only to warfare and disease. Spain’s transatlantic trade had contracted sharply from the start of the seventeenth century, leading to a contagious financial crisis that brought Genoa and its banking system to its knees. Part of the reason for this was the maturing of economies in the New World that saw greater levels of internal trade combined with an increased ability of local officials, landowners and merchants to build up their own resources. Where around 30,000 tons of goods were shipped to Spain in the 1610s, less than half that quantity was being sent across the Atlantic thirty years later. Other economies were also experiencing transitions that were in some cases accelerated by wars that had substantial impacts on supply and demand. Industry in Venice contracted by half in the first decades of the seventeenth century, as did exports from Tuscany, while English sales of woollen cloth in continental Europe suffered a similar level of collapse.115
The great upheavals and crises struck many as extraordinarily severe and unusual. ‘God Almighty has a quarrel lately with all mankind, and given the reins to the ill spirit to compass the whole earth,’ wrote James Howell, a historian, in the middle of the seventeenth century. For more than a decade ‘there have the strangest revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over, that have befallen mankind, I dare boldly say, since Adam fell, in so short a revolution of time’. It would seem, said Howell, ‘the whole world is off the hinges’.116
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Particularly harsh weather was part of the story of disruption. Rather than taking place every five years or so, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) took place twice as frequently, including in 1638, 1639, 1641, 1642 and a further eight times in the next twenty years. The western United States and Canadian Rockies experienced prolonged periods of drought, as did the Valley of Mexico, where processions were held invoking the intercession of the Virgin Mary to bring rain. Challenging conditions were the norm in many places around the world, from the coldest winter ever recorded in Scandinavia to the failure of rice harvests in South-East Asia, chronic food shortages in India and Central Asia and chaos in many parts of East Asia where the monsoon was extremely weak in this period.117 The unusual conditions were aggravated by the eruptions of Komagatake in 1640 and above all of Parker Peak in the Philippines a year later, which extended drought conditions by at least three years.118
This came at a particularly testing time in China, where the fall of the Ming dynasty has often been linked to poor weather generally and to climatic change in particular.119 It is not hard to see why. In 1640, poor harvests were accompanied by locust swarms, food shortages, sky-high prices and outbreaks of disease. The next three years (1641–4) then produced the worst drought in 500 years.120 Zeng Yuwang, an eyewitness who wrote about the suffering that followed, leaves little to the imagination. First came a plague of locusts who were so many that they piled up a foot high in people’s compounds and forced Zeng to cover his face with a fan so that he could breathe when he was out of the house. ‘I could barely stand up under the weight of the locusts clinging to my fan and to my clothes and hat.’
In 1642, he wrote, famine struck, causing huge loss of life. ‘All along our route home,’ he wrote, ‘we saw corpses scattered about in the fields, and innumerable children abandoned by the side of the road…To be walking properly attired down an unending road of corpses was a nightmare the likes of which I had never known. Approaching the village, we saw six or seven people stripping bark off elm trees’ trying to feed themselves.121
In Suzhou, the engine room of Ming dynasty economic development where anything and anything could be bought in the early seventeenth century, where shops lined the streets and merchants houses with their delightful gardens characterised the prosperity of the city and its inhabitants, things looked bleak indeed. ‘Most of the residences in the city are empty and they are falling into ruins,’ recounted Ye Shaoyuan, a scholar who wrote extensively about the traumas of these times. ‘Fertile farms and beautiful estates are for sale but there is no one to buy them. Formerly the city of Suzhou was prosperous and its people tended to be extravagant. It is natural that after a period of prosperity a period of depression should follow; but I never dreamed that I should have to witness these misfortunes in the days of my life.’122
Anxieties were heightened by reports of rebel armies taking up arms, the result of years of uprisings and unrest gathering steam under disgruntled Ming officials like Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, who captured the imagination – and gained the support – of the peasantry by promising land reform and an overhaul of the taxation system, as well as by being successful bandit leaders who were able to deliver rewards to their supporters.123
By the end of the 1630s, the rebel army numbered in the tens of thousands – if not more – and was not only capturing cities and taking control of provinces but was soon bearing down on Beijing itself. Worrying omens spelled trouble in a state where disorder was understood as a sign of divine disfavour. Further harbingers of doom were provided by an earthquake in early 1644, by strange-coloured pears appearing on trees, by ominous winds that rose shortly before the start of the annual veneration of Confucius and by not a single baby being born in the capital, Beijing.124
As rebel forces closed in on the capital in the spring of 1644 and then gained entry through the city gates, the Chongzhen Emperor apologised to his relatives that they should be part of his unlucky family, instructed his wife to commit suicide, told the younger members to disguise themselves and flee, and then hung himself from a tree. He reportedly left a letter noting that his ‘inadequate virtues and weak flesh have invited punishment from Heaven’. Although his officials deserved the blame, he went on, ‘I must die but am ashamed to face my ancestors. Therefore I take off my crown and cover my face with my hair.’ And with that the Ming dynasty that had ruled China for almost 300 years came to an end.125
While the climatic misfortunes of the 1640s cannot have helped, given the starvation and disease, and also given the loss of prestige, credibility and authority of the Emperor personally, the reality was that the fall of the Ming had been a long time coming and had deep roots. These included population growth that almost tripled from about 70 million around 1400 to more than 200 million by 1644, a rise in military spending in the late sixteenth century which meant that 76 per cent of all government expenditure went towards provisioning and equipping troops, and using them in costly engagements, particularly on the northern frontiers, and an eye-wateringly profligate waste of resources on the ‘confusions of pleasure’.126
Lavish levels of spending on the palace and the court – which included maintaining 3,000 court ladies and an apparent 20,000 eunuchs – went hand in hand with high levels of corruption, endemic bribery being a product of low salaries and regular opportunity and temptation. Eunuchs collected imperial rents, administered tax, oversaw government storehouses and ran the secret police. This came at a high cost in regular payments, combined with inefficiencies and inflated costs as a result of regular kickbacks pocketed by eunuchs, and also at the price of the Emperor being shielded from reality as these officials grew more powerful. As one popular ditty addressed to the Emperor from the 1630s put it:
You’re getting on, your ears are deaf, your eyes are gone
Can’t see people, can’t hear words…
How can you be so high? Come down to earth.127
The problems in Ming China were made worse by a cycle of desperate measures, poor decision-making and bad luck. Cuts to the postal service of some 30 per cent in 1629 were imposed in order to save money but ended up rendering efforts to deal with uprisings more difficult as information supply and orders slowed down. The ranks of the poor, hungry and disgruntled were swelled by officials who had lost their jobs in similar cost-cutting exercises. Growing banditry added to the sense of confusion and chaos, as well as to ideas about incompetence at the highest levels of government. Major changes to patterns of global commerce, over which the Ming dynasty had little control and even less understanding, were a factor too: China had been the world’s great silver sink, sucking in bullion from the Americas via Manila. But from the start of the seventeenth century, trade competition from other locations in South and South-East Asia had risen sharply; Japanese decisions to cut off trade with Macao shut off an important market; while the capture of Melaka by the Dutch likewise had a major impact on Chinese silver imports.128
The collapse of the silver mines of Potosí in 1630, the reduced number of Chinese trading ships and the loss of galleons sailing across the Pacific because of poor seamanship and strong typhoons also proved damaging. Among those wrecked in 1638, for example, was the flagship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, the largest vessel built at that time.129 Losses such as these brought about change, since they represented major setbacks for the Spanish crown, which monopolised trans-Pacific trade. The year 1640 marked a turning point not only as the end of a period of rapid growth and high profits dating back to the 1580s, but because it saw a fundamental curtailment of shipping from Acapulco, the principal point of embarkation in the Americas to Manila, the entry point to Asia. In order to try to control the bribery that had made ships leave port overloaded, late or both, it was decided that the number of vessels travelling the route each year across the Pacific should be reduced – to one.130 For China, it was like the oxygen supply being cut off to a patient that was already sick.
This was all made worse by dislocation in the provinces which played a major part in the collapse of central tax collection, while falling levels of agricultural production created pressures of their own: some estimates suggest the amount of land being cultivated in China fell from almost 200 million acres at the start of the seventeenth century to less than a third of that by the time of the collapse of the Ming.131 China was trapped in a death spiral, in other words, locked in above all by the failure to adapt to or deal with mounting problems. But it means the collapse had roots that extended far deeper and lasted for far longer than climate crises in the build-up to 1644 or even in the years that preceded the fall of the Ming.
In the circumstances, then, the turbulent climate in the late 1630s and early 1640s clearly did not help; but this was one factor among a very wide range of others that dovetailed and came together to bring about the end of a dynasty. It was a similar story in many other parts of the world, as political challenges, economic contraction and demographic loss through warfare, disease and famine proved so deadly at roughly the same time. It did not take much to upset precarious balances that relied on fine margins of error.
However, it was not the same story in every part of the world. Tokugawa Japan, for example, and the Low Countries were able to navigate very similar climatic conditions that proved so devastating in China without the catastrophic problems of epidemic disease, famine and the overthrow of the ruling elite. The secret to this success lay in the mundane: the competence of officials and administrators in recognising problems, in anticipating the challenges they would bring and in planning ahead accordingly.132 Climate was an aggravating factor, in other words, where problems already existed.
It is important to steer away from the irresistible temptation of the historian to identify watershed moments, to pinpoint events that can be described as turning points. The fall of the Ming dynasty clearly had repercussions and a high level of symbolic resonance both at the time and looking back with hindsight. However, the reality is that such transitions had much more ambiguous meanings for most contemporaries. Who sat on the throne was presumably less important than taxation demands that emanated from regional and imperial political and administrative centres. In that sense, the significance of the transition to the Qing was more obviously felt in the arrival of new hairstyles, new customs and new pastimes that were introduced at the court and then fanned outwards: frontier products like fur became the markers of elite Chinese fashion, while mushrooms from Mongolia, freshwater pearls from Manchuria and exotic foods from South-East Asia and Oceania put a raft of commodities under pressure as they were exploited for the benefit of metropolitan markets.133
Nevertheless, the challenges of the ‘general crisis’ of the seventeenth century produced important responses. The most significant of these was about putting plans in place to mitigate risk and to reduce the chances of being exposed to a range of problems being shaken into a cocktail at the same time. There were many ways to go about doing this: improving communication and efficiency; putting time, effort and resources into agricultural sciences; and opening up or taking over new lands that brought with them solutions to one of the oldest problems in human history: how to enable cities to expand and grow beyond the extent of their own hinterland. As we have seen, parts of western Europe had already done just that in the New World. Others too were about to try to do the same.
