Climate Catastrophe in the 17th century

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides - the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were both unprecedented and widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns, longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers - disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died.

Geoffrey Parker, distinguished University Professor and Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History join Dan on the podcast to discuss the sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched across the 1600s. They discuss the link between climate change and worldwide catastrophe 350 years ago, and the contemporary implications: are we at all prepared today for the catastrophes that climate change could bring tomorrow?

Geoffrey is the author of ‘Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century'.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody welcome to Dance Noise History here. What a treat it is to be launching ourselves into another year
0:06.7	2022 will come in at your heart everybody history is going crazy this year
0:10.6	We're gonna be digging up medieval kings. We're gonna be finding shipwrecks
0:14.1	We're gonna be scaring the battlefields of France for elusive artifacts
0:17.6	They've been sought after by generations of archaeologists. It's all happening this year folks
0:22.3	But I think it's time to get us started right at the beginning of the year
0:25.4	I'm bringing you a complete legend now Jeffrey Parker
0:27.8	Jeffrey Parker is an encouraged English professor of European history at a higher state university
0:34.0	Over a long career he's written at many books many of which were some of the books that really got me into history in the 80s and 90s
0:40.9	I'm hugely grateful for his work on the kind of military revolution of the 17th century in Europe his book about Spanish Armada
0:48.3	It was a classic. I mean, I've he's this is a big moment for me. I'm meeting one of my heroes. They always say don't me your heroes
0:54.7	I've always sought that is garbage because in 2013 he wrote a ministerial book
1:01.7	It's probably on the best history books. I have ever read it should be on all of your shelves
1:05.8	It's called global crisis war climate and catastrophe in the 17th century and in that book
1:11.2	He marries two intellectual strands one is this sense that historians have had that the 17th century was a terrible time to be alive
1:17.8	folks a gigantic wave of wars and revolutions and conflict stretching right across the erasure
1:23.8	But and beyond but subtically erasure where we have mostly archival sources from Ireland to Japan a
1:30.8	Cataclysm
1:32.0	Resulting in the deaths of millions of human beings
1:35.0	But also climate scientists who now think that period was also one of global cooling
1:40.4	Jeffrey Parker married to two together as to explain this podcast and points out we're all just
1:46.1	Running around with our ideas and our religions and our politics on the back of the global climate
	...

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