The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China

Since the 1990s historians have reconceptualized China's “late imperial” period as one of “early modernity,” which has entailed a shift in focus toward China's relationship to global forces that spanned the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Timothy Brook's The Price of Collapse exemplifies this turn toward situating “China in a context greater than itself” (x).Brook's central thesis is that the collapse of the Ming “cannot be explained in the absence of climate and human responses to climate” (x). A climatic cooling event in the northern hemisphere known as the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–1850)—particularly, the Spörer (c. 1450–1550) and Maunder (c. 1645–1715) Minimums—were the deep currents that structured historical change at both ends of Eurasia over the longue durée.In support of this thesis Brook relies upon grain prices as proxy indicators of climate change. He has spent decades gleaning price data from dynastic histories, legal and administrative compendia, local gazetteers, agricultural treatises, a business ledger, travelogues, and fiction, largely in Chinese but also in Korean, English, and French. The tables and graphs found throughout the work and its scholarly apparatus constitute the foundation upon which an analytical edifice is built.On the whole, this edifice sometimes seems disjointed, perhaps because Brook's initial goal of determining the cost of living for ordinary people during the Ming period “proved elusive” (163). This complication then led Brook to interpret his price data through the lens of environmental history. While these two distinct lines of inquiry don't always hang together, the book may be appreciated for its many insights.Chapter 1 begins with a contemporary observer named Chen Qide (born ca. 1570), a member of the lower gentry who recorded (and lamented) unprecedented shifts in local weather and prices in the early 1640s. These observations serve as a reference point throughout, and Brook characterizes his study as “an extended footnote to Chen's account of the disasters of 1640–42” (10). The following chapter is devoted to ascertaining “whether Chen Qide was justified in recalling the Wanli era [1573–1620] as the halcyon age he wanted it to be” (33). With this question in mind, Brook reconstructs what he dubs “the Wanli price regime” and details “how people managed their lives within that regime” (32) by estimating prices for a range of basic necessities as well as costs and standards of living for people in all social strata.In chapter 3 Brook interrogates the predominant argument that economic growth and sociopolitical collapse in late Ming China (ca. 1580s–1640s) are attributable to fluctuating flows of silver from Spanish America and Japan. Theoretically, substantial inflows of silver must have had noticeable effects on certain areas of the Ming economy; however, empirically, Brook has found no compelling evidence that late Ming China experienced a generalized “price revolution” akin to that in early modern Europe. Instead, he proposes an alternative hypothesis “that global climate, not global trade, drove Ming grain prices to crippling levels” in the 1630s and 1640s (105).Brook develops this analysis in chapter 4, “align[ing] the major fluctuations in Ming grain prices with changes in climate” (123) and thereby identifying six “sloughs”—that is, “multi-year periods during the Ming when severe temperature or precipitation abnormalities or both coincided with documentary reports of environmental crisis, famine, and social distress” (128). During the Little Ice Age's most intense phase, in the early to mid-seventeenth century, increasingly frequent and severe cold spells and droughts devastated agricultural production and drove grain prices to historical highs.Chapter 5 places this drastic downturn—the so-called “Chongzhen Slough” (1638–44)—within a longer time scale by utilizing “a lower-level theory of price revolution” known as the price wave (139–140). Brook finds no indication that the “Chongzhen price surge” of the late 1630s and early 1640s was preceded by moderate but persistent price rises starting in the 1580s. In short, the spike in prices at the very end of the Ming “rose on its own” and was not caused by longer-term inflationary pressures associated with an expanding money supply (152). Instead, “famine prices from the Chongzhen Slough,” which continued through the 1690s, constituted “a tsunami-like surge” that was triggered by “the sudden shock of profound climate disruption” (159).The Price of Collapse underscores environmental stress as the root of the crises that ultimately destroyed the late Ming state and society, but without succumbing to a crude determinism. By delving into the particularities of the Little Ice Age's historical impact in China, Timothy Brook has produced a short but masterful work of scholarship that will interest specialists in Chinese history as well as students of European, global, and environmental histories.