Climate Catastrophe In The 17thC – Geoffrey Parker

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

As the name suggests, this concentrates on the period when the Little Ice Age was at arguably its nadir, the 17thC, and describes how it affected not just Europe, but many other parts of the world.

Amazon’s blurb sets the scene:

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides – the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly 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. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of ‘natural’ as well as ‘human’ archives transforms our understanding of…

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