Nature’s Mutiny

 Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

Philipp Blom (German original, 2017; English translation by the author, Liveright, 2019)

     “A two-degree [Celsius] drop in annual mean temperature translates into almost three weeks of lost growing time, meaning that crops were very much slower to ripen, and sometimes failed to ripen at all.” From the 1560’s until the end of the following century, a period known as the Little Ice Age, unusual weather disrupted the patterns of agricultural and economic life that had obtained in Europe for the preceding thousand years. Some summers were hot and dry, while others seemed to barely come at all. Some winters were so frigid that the Thames bore thick enough ice to be used as a sort of fairground.

 

      This was a worldwide phenomenon. “There were reports of population collapse due to famine in Ming-period China, as well as murderous winters in North America and paltry harvests in India…” Philipp Blom concentrates on Europe’s history for a few obvious reasons. For one thing, we have the most complete records there, not only from individual diarists, but from business records, like those from vineyards that recorded the dates of the harvests and the amounts of the yields. Second, Blom is at home in German and English, but the contemporary Chinese or South American records would have come to him only heavily mediated.

 

     There’s certainly more than enough to say about Europe! The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe saw profound changes in how people lived. Recurrent crop failures strained local economies, both at the level of the hand-to-mouth peasant, and up the ladder, where the landowner couldn’t raise enough surplus from his tenants to pay his own obligations to the central government. At the same time, the local common space in which a peasant family could keep a cow or pig began to be seized by landowners, who found sheep or cattle easier and more profitable to manage than human beings. The feudal system, in which people were tied to a small geographic area and the social station they were born into, gave way to life in industrial towns or flourishing cities.

 

      To that broadly well-known story, Blom adds some captivating details. You may recall that the Spanish Armada of 1588 failed to invade and conquer Elizabethan England, despite mustering 130 ships and over ten thousand sailors and soldiers. In the English Channel, the Spanish ships were harassed and damaged by the English fleet, and threatened by its fireships, to avoid which many cut their anchors and fled. At last, they headed north, sailing the long way around the British Isles–only to encounter an arctic storm, with hurricane-force winds, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. Only half of the ships limped back to Spain; the soldiers and crews were weak with illness and starvation.

   

       That military force was the largest seen in centuries, but it would not remain so. Modern weapons and modern tactics were developed together. “A victorious campaign, or even the capacity to deter potential invaders, required not only vast armies and fleets but also experts trained to control the complex logistics, constructions, tactics, supplies, and accounts, as well as vast amounts of treasure. Perhaps war really is the father of all things.” That is, modern warfare necessitated modern economics, in the form of mercantilism: an emerging middle class learned to manage tariffs, trade balances, and colonial administration.

 

     In the late sixteenth century, the Little Ice Age was seen as a religious problem, to be met with prayer, and desperate measures like witch-burning. Voltaire, Descartes, and their contemporaries would turn Europe toward rationality and the Enlightenment; Blom also introduces some other thinkers, largely written out of Enlightenment history, who might offer us alternatives to materialism and mercantilism, in case our current attempts attempts at dominating nature don’t work out so well.

 

    I recommend Nature’s Mutiny, though perhaps not as beach or casual reading; the writing is rich and dense, befitting its origin in German. Even if I don’t start ordering books from the twenty-page bibliography, I think I’ll be chewing on it for a while.

 

Any Good Books, January 2025 by email