
The General Crisis of the 17th Century - benbreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis
======
btilly
Regardless of what you think about whether these crises were connected, they
did give rise to a rather important idea. At its heart, the idea is that, "I
won't kill you for your beliefs if you aren't going to kill me for mine."

This may seem like common sense today, but historically we only arrived at it
after having plenty of opportunity to deal with the aftermath of people being
willing to kill each other for having different ideas about whether, for
instance, Christianity is what the Catholic Church teaches us that it is.

This tolerance gave rise to such ideas as freedom of speech, freedom of
religion, and so on. Which were key ideas from the Age of Enlightenment, which
ideals influenced the US Constitution and Western culture to this day.

~~~
pluma
This is actually exactly how I've recently heard the Peace of Westphalia[0]
described (which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany): it established the
idea that nations are independent "wholes" with their own laws, religion and
politics, and that that's okay.

The ideas encoded in the agreement are basically the reason we think of events
like the Crimean secession[1] as an unconstitutional Russian annexation
regardless of whether it happened by a public vote or not: even if there was a
referendum and even if that referendum was formally valid and the outcome was
in favour of the secession, the constitution of the Ukraine forbids the
secession and therefore renders the referendum invalid by definition.

It's also important to note that these ideas of statehood popped up in the (at
the time) Christian world and therefore strongly shaped the face of modern
Christianity and the separation of state and church in the West (which even in
its worst cases still works better today than it did before the
Enlightenment). This didn't happen in the Islamic world, at least not in the
same way (though there are examples for church-state separation as in post-WW1
Turkey). I think this provides some insights into why that part of the world's
politics is so poorly understood by Westerners (e.g. consider the tribal
politics in Afghanistan or the Sunni-Shia conflicts all over the map).

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia)

[1]: Whether it was an annexation or secession and whether it was formally
valid or not is a separate debate. There is a lot of evidence indicating that
it was, to say the least, influenced by Russia, which would have made its
validity doubtful even if it wasn't unconstitutional.

~~~
derefr
> even if there was a referendum and even if that referendum was formally
> valid and the outcome was in favour of the secession, the constitution of
> the Ukraine forbids the secession and therefore renders the referendum
> invalid by definition.

That's kind of weird. What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a
constitution, then?

I would assume that if every citizen revokes their citizenship to the original
country, then the original country ceases to exist, no? (Or rather, retains no
more sovereignty than a "country" like Sealand.)

~~~
tomjen3
Most constitutions can be amended, but unless there are people with guns ready
to back them up they are, to quote George Bush, "just a piece of paper".

------
tjradcliffe
Parker's book on the topic is a good one-volume cover of the history from a
global perspective. The climate data are pretty clear on how weird things
were, with no shortage of "most extreme ever" events from China to England:

[http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe-
Seve...](http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe-
Seventeenth/dp/0300208634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434393062&sr=8-1&keywords=global+crisis)

Concepts--all concepts--are made things, and the edges we draw around them are
the edges of our attention. People draw those edges in different places, or
not at all, depending on their priors. As such, a certain type of person will
argue that there wasn't "really" a "general criss" in the 17th century because
the panoply of events aren't enough to trigger their edge-detectors, and they
feel that their edge-detectors are arbiters of reality. Arguments of this
nature are rarely productive. The events happened regardless of what you call
them.

That the global climate underwent a statistically significant excursion in the
17th century is hard to argue against. That that excursion was also
economically significant is likewise difficult to argue against. Unprecedented
multi-year runs of poor harvests aren't really something that can be wished
away with ideology. Finally, that the economic excursion helped drive
political decision making should be relatively uncontroversial, unless one
were to argue that politics happens in an economic vacuum.

Parker does a good job of emphasizing the contingency of outcomes. People made
decisions for reasons that seemed good to them--often of the form "God loves
my country, so if I do X, Y will necessarily and certainly happen!"\--and
results followed for unrelated reasons (often of the form, "Luck.")

He also argues that something like 1/3 of the human species died in the
crisis, which is fairly astonishing, but given the death tolls for the places
where we have data, not entirely unsupportable.

------
lkrubner
There are some interesting comparisons between (what the economist Tyler Cowen
refers to as) The Great Stagnation Of 1973-now, and The Really Great
Stagnation of 1650-1740. Restraining the comparison to the English speaking
nations, we can say:

1.) Both episodes begin with a cultural revolution that has no precedent (the
arrival of militant Protestantism versus the arrival of the counter-culture of
the 1960s)

2.) Both episodes witness a fundamental reassessment of what property is. (The
closing of the commons giving rise to the concept of private property, versus
the modern rise of intellectual property).

3.) Both episodes see important intellectual innovation, against a background
of economic stagnation (Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Boyle, versus the rise of
modern genetics --- although, arguably, this is an area where the analogy
breaks down, as nothing of the last 50 years seems to match the importance of
Newton or Boyle).

4.) Both episodes see a civil rights struggle that fundamentally changes the
relationship between the citizen and the state (freedom of religion being the
big struggle of the 1600s, freedom from racial discrimination being the
struggle of recent times).

The Really Great Stagnation ended with the Industrial Revolution. The current
stagnation ends with...

~~~
norea-armozel
It probably ends with commercial fusion power or a similar technological gain
on power generation. Cheap power makes most of the stuff we use or make much
cheaper. Which leads to a major change in the living standard and expectations
(imagine access to electricity being seen as a right since power generation
would outstrip demand if something like fusion became viable).

~~~
trhway
it correlates with climate change nicely - the 1650 was the time of the Little
Ice Age which significantly affected the production of food and everything
else. The fusion power (or similar) would allow to mitigate and finally
overcome the current climate change catastrophe (the fact that it moves slowly
doesn't make it less serious - just like a huge container ship - the
mass/inertia makes for the speed in collision :) which is starting to cause
real economic damage (cattle growing in Texas, agriculture in CA for example).
And it is just the beginning...

------
amyjess
Anybody interested in the subject should read Neal Stephenson's _The Baroque
Cycle_. It's an excellent fictionalized account of the time period, focusing
on the social and economic transformations (specifically, from a land-based
economy and culture to a money-based one), which Stephenson posits is the
birth of the modern world.

------
Someone
So, where is the test for "Distribution of conflicts does not follow a Poisson
distribution?"

Certainly, that is a necessary condition before one can claim that a period is
special in some way.

Yes, one can tweak the raw data by adjusting the time period, the estimation
of the magnitude and number of conflicts (for example, was the 80-year war a
single war? There certainly was a 12-year truce that likely was longer than
many periods of formal peace), and by what areas of conflict to include, but
that should only make it easier to get a statistically significant result.

------
oldpond
This is a fascinating period of history. Our modern financial system is born
during this period. I'm reading up on Cromwell and the English Civil Wars
right now. There is a ton of great Dutch history during this period as well,
especially the Dutch East India Company. Thanks for sharing.

------
ginko
I guess this is somewhat connected to the concept of the European Civil War:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War)

------
applecore
Interesting concept, although the single most significant event of that era
would have to be the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in
1648.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
And of our era, 9/11, the beginning of the end of the Westphalian state-based
order and signaling a new world order of overlapping authorities and
loyalties, from multinational corporations to terrorist organizations. "The
Modern Mercenary" by Sean McFate is a good book based on this idea.

~~~
dragonwriter
9/11 isn't even close to the beginning of the end of the Westphalian order.
The increasing domination of multinational corporations, labor organizations,
political movements, terrorist organizations, etc., was widely observed and
pointed to as evidence of the progressive decline of the nation-state order
for many decades prior to 9/11.

~~~
ghaff
While I don't disagree, it's still true that much (though not all) of trans-
national activity still takes place within an overall Westphalian state
framework. (And one of the big exceptions--the Middle East--is essentially a
result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire post-WWI.

------
agumonkey
Is there a crises timeline ? of some kind of transition map ? for periodicity
...

------
chroncilinks
Maybe it is a little late in the day but I just read that and I don't think I
got anything out of it. Some people say it existed and some say it didn't.
What's the point?

~~~
DubiousPusher
When studying history, there is utility in developing and understanding
frameworks for grouping historical events. It's also important to understand
that these models are often flawed.

If you are interested in history as a series of facts, then this notion isn't
particularly useful. But if you are curious as to how our modern societies
came to be, you will endlessly scour history for patterns demonstrating how
our era is different and how it is not from other eras, how the eras leading
up to it were different and how similar eras may or may not have flourished in
bygone ages.

~~~
aaronem
> developing and understanding frameworks for grouping historical events

This is called "historiography", and were it more commonly taught in US
primary and secondary schools, fewer Americans would think of "history" as
being dull -- an endless stream of bare facts lacking context is indeed dull
as dishwater; it's in the drawing and analysis of narrative that all the
interest lies.

~~~
anigbrowl
I too would like it taught in schools, but I also think its important to have
reliable sources for the bare facts. It depresses me when I go to the history
section in a bookstore and see how much of it is given over to conflicting
viewpoints of the same events, so there's (almost) different versions of
history available depending on what you already like to believe - conservative
history over here, liberal history over there, progressive history in this
corner and so on.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I too would like it taught in schools, but I also think its important to
> have reliable sources for the bare facts.

No such thing is possible. Facts are inferred unreliably from physical
evidence and (at best) primary sources which are written by people who (claim
to have) direct experience, but who also write with agendas.

> It depresses me when I go to the history section in a bookstore and see how
> much of it is given over to conflicting viewpoints of the same events, so
> there's (almost) different versions of history available depending on what
> you already like to believe

I don't know how you'd expect it to be otherwise; if you look at first-person
accounts of _current_ events, its clear that agendas and biases shape them,
and history is largely what is pieced together from those kinds of accounts
(often _fragments_ of those kinds of accounts!) plus fragmentary physical
evidence. Even if _historians_ didn't have their own biases, there's multiple
self-narratives that can be reconstructed to explain the evidence historians
work from and no foolproof way to choose the right one from among those.

~~~
anigbrowl
I think you're exaggerating the difficulty. We have more than sufficient
documentation of many facts to make definitive statements about them, and
where we are not sure abou ttheir provenance we can qualify our statements as
being limited to a sinlge source or being controversial. We could, for
example, dispute the historical causes of the Battle of Waterloo all day, but
there's widespread agreement that it took place 200 years ago next Thursday,
who the principles were, how it proceeded, and what the outcome was. Of course
there are numerous details about the event that event that remain the subject
of historical inquiry; did Wellington meet Blucher at 9pm or 10pm, and where
on the battlefield did this meeting take place?

It's certainly true that any historical incident comes with a mass of
unanswered questions, sometimes of great import - witness the ongoing
controversies over the assassination of Kennedy or the authorship of the
September 11 2001 attacks in modern times. But there is little dispute that
that assassination and those attacks took place on those dates, what the basic
nature of those events were and what major changes ensued in the aftermath.
Although we face significant epistemological limitations in studying history,
you seem to be arguing an almost solipsistic position, as if the impossibility
of knowing everything invalidated the notion of knowing anything.

~~~
fineman
Matters of fact (even if wrong) can be linked together into a web of evidence
and assumptions and would serve at least to illustrate what we know and don't
know.

------
thomasmarriott
'Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory'

