As a history education major, I tend to find history useful in analyzing the current condition of human society, and one event that I have only recently become aware of is a period of time known as "The General Crisis" which lasted throughout the first half of the seventeenth century. One of the waning years of this crisis was the year 1648, which, as I also just recently learned, is the last year in recorded history where the overall human population went down instead of up. What exactly was the General Crisis, and how is a period of hardship over three hundred years ago still relevant today?
The General Crisis was not contained to one specific country or region but was a series of declines in standard of living and increases in mortality that were persistent across the entire globe. Interestingly, this crisis seemingly came at the exact same time that the human race as a whole was becoming much more wealthy and much more connected with the Columbian Exchange in its most productive and lucrative periods. This led to a much broader and larger amount of food available as well as new resources such as silver, which was much more valuable at the time and led to vast increases in wealth for European empires such as Spain.
You would think that with more money and more food available, that would translate to more people, but unfortunately, it does not. This same transfer of goods and raw materials also carried diseases, and for groups like the Native Americans who were not immune, it led to hundreds of millions of deaths across the Americas. Some estimates put the percentage of Native Americans killed at above ninety percent. The Atlantic slave trade was also prevalent and growing; many Africans died on the trip to the Americas, and those that survived saw their lifespans lowered drastically.
European populations were also declining due to the Thirty Years War, which is one of the longest and bloodiest wars ever fought in the history of Europe. In addition, Spain became wealthy after the discovery and extraction of silver in Argentina. However, the Spanish did not understand the concept of inflation, and when you bring a crap ton of silver into your country, inflation is going to happen and it will happen a lot. China also saw major turmoil during this period, specifically the collapse of the Ming dynasty, as they also had the inflation problem that Spain did, but lower food production was a much larger factor.
So what does the Greater Crisis have to do with us? Well, it should also be considered that all of these events took place during a period of climate change. The entire planet got cooler, resulting in a mini-ice age of sorts. There are also many similarities between their world and hours. However, this increase in wealth does not translate to human lives getting longer and healthier, quite the opposite actually. Never have human beings been so interconnected with each other, and never has there been such an abundance of food and wealth, and these are certainly very good things, but if the Greater Crisis tells us anything, it is this: progress is never guaranteed, changing climates can cause global instability, and growing wealth is only as good as how much that wealth and growth is shared among all of us.
