The Little Ice Age and the General Crisis of the 17th century
- Date
- 17th century (peak cooling c. 1600–1700)
- Category
- Environment & climate
- Region
- Global (Northern Hemisphere)
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
During the seventeenth century the Northern Hemisphere experienced the deepest cold of the Little Ice Age, with falling temperatures, shortened growing seasons and erratic weather driven partly by reduced solar activity and volcanic eruptions.
Historians, notably Geoffrey Parker, argue that this climatic downturn coincided with a worldwide wave of harvest failures, famine, epidemic disease, rebellion and war, a 'General Crisis' that may have killed a substantial fraction of the global population. The same decades saw the Thirty Years' War devastate central Europe, the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China amid drought and famine, revolts across the Spanish empire, civil war in Britain, and upheavals from the Ottoman lands to Mughal India. Parker stresses a 'fatal synergy' between climatic cooling, food shortage, disease and political conflict, while noting that some societies, such as Tokugawa Japan, weathered the crisis through stability rather than war. The episode is a landmark case study of how environmental change can interact with human institutions to produce simultaneous crises across continents.
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Empires active in 17th century (peak cooling c. 1600–1700)
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
- Ming Dynasty1368 CE – 1644 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
Related environment & climate events
- 1556 Shaanxi EarthquakeJanuary 23, 1556
- Deforestation and Ecological Transformation of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)c. 1600 CE
- Eruption of Huaynaputina19 February 1600
- The Great Lisbon Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fire1 November 1755
- Laki Fissure Eruption and the Mist Hardships Famine8 June 1783 – 7 February 1784
- Great Bengal Famine of 17701769–1770
Further reading
The wider story
A New Green History of the World
The classic accessible account of how environment and climate have shaped human history.
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