Global Crisis

War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

By: Geoffrey Parker

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Length: 48 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-seventeenth century.

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis.

Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

©2013 Geoffrey Parker (P)2022 Tantor

A Century of Drama and Catastrophe

Monumental telling of the calamitous 17th century. The first couple of hours are a little bit dry as the author goes into detail on all the climate changes taking place in the century and its ramifications.
Then he goes into a detailed, dramatic and detailed historic account of every country and region from Britain to Japan, and if you read Parker’s superb biographies of Charles V and his son and successor, you are in for a good read,
Don’t let the 50 hours scare you away, it’s a great entertaining listen, past the first couple of hours (which are not bad, just dry).

Very informational

Based on our last pandemic experience, we are not prepared to confront natural disasters or diseases.

48 hours I'll never get back

J.K. Rowlings and Geoffrey Parker share one thing in common; they lack an internal editor. As a former professor of world history, I was eager to read Parker's thoughts on how climate impacted the world system of the Seventeenth Century. Unfortunately, Parker often forgets his purported focus. Instead we have a bloated text that tries to cover every historical, economic, social and meteorological event over one hundred years on five continents. Parker's research is exhaustive and because he cannot edit himself he exhausts us. There is a super-abundance of facts that often stray from his thesis that the little ice age of the 17th C. exacerbated the effects of war, economic recession, and political disturbance that in better climatological times civilizations were able to withstand. When three examples would suffice, Parker gives us twelve. Each goes on at such length that we forget what he's trying to prove. So distracted describing the horrific details of this century he often fails to explain their relationship to climatological change. It doesn't help that Parker repeats the same examples throughout. After the first four hours I thought, "Okay I get it. It was grim.." As a world systems study, however, it falls short. He certainly establishes a correlation between climatological shifts and human misery, but he is much weaker at showing causation.

It doesn't help that the narrator sounds like a Puritan minister giving a Sunday sermon on the inevitable damnation of our souls. This audible recording has the pacing of an Old Testament litany of biblical genocide. Worst still is how the narrator plays into Parker's writing style. Parker cannot simply say that "the besieging forces killed 30,000," he has to add, "men, women" (dramatic pause "and children." The "rule of three" permeates his sentences. resulting in a style that is tedious, depressing and distracting. Long before this book was over I wanted to open a vain. If you still want to give this time-suck of a book a listen, set the play speed to 1.2 and get out of church soon enough to cut the grass.