The General Crisis of the 17th Century
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The General Crisis of the 17th Century
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Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#2Regardless 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.
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#3Interesting 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.
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#4Regardless 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 havin…
Well, that's a very Protestant, Whiggish view of things. Catholic Emancipation in the UK wasn't complete until 1829 for example. The idea of the Glorious Revolution as ushering in a democratic and free era was really only true if you were an Anglican, slightly less so for Dissenters, and very much less so for Catholics (both in Britain and Ireland).
I think a lot of those crises in Europe were just continuations of the Reformation in many respects.
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#5Maybe 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?
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#6Interesting 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.
I'd say the Glorious Revolution is right up there with it, as it was such a formative influence in for the American revolutionaries.
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#7Regardless 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 havin…
Well, that's a very Protestant, Whiggish view of things. Catholic Emancipation in the UK wasn't complete until 1829 for example. The idea of the Glorious Revolution as ushering in a democratic and free era was really only true if you were an Anglican, slightly less so for Dissenters, and very much less so for Catholics (both in Britain and Ireland). I think a lot of those crises in Europe were just continuations of t…
Re:whiggish-ness
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#8Maybe 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?
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.
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#9Parker'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...
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.
Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century
#10This 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.