11 ms·

The General Crisis of the 17th Century

89 points by benbreen 11y ago

btilly 11y ago
Regardless of what you think about whether these crises were connected, they did give rise to a rather important idea. At its heart, the idea is that, "I won't kill you for your beliefs if you aren't going to kill me for mine." This may seem like common sense today, but historically we only arrived at it after having plenty of opportunity to deal with the aftermath of people being willing to kill each other for having different ideas about whether, for instance, Christianity is what the Catholic Church teaches us that it is. This tolerance gave rise to such ideas as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on. Which were key ideas from the Age of Enlightenment, which ideals influenced the US Constitution and Western culture to this day.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  Well, that's a very Protestant, Whiggish view of things. Catholic Emancipation in the UK wasn't complete until 1829 for example. The idea of the Glorious Revolution as ushering in a democratic and free era was really only true if you were an Anglican, slightly less so for Dissenters, and very much less so for Catholics (both in Britain and Ireland). I think a lot of those crises in Europe were just continuations of the Reformation in many respects.
  - bgilroy26 11y ago
    Re:whiggish-ness https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2012/two-cheers-for-the-whig-interpretation-of-history https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
    - DubiousPusher 11y ago
      Thanks for posting this. That essay is fantastic. It's actually a perfect complement to that article and the discussion happening in this entire thread. It beautifully highlights the modern historian's crisis. You cannot distill history into a framework because any unique set of events seem to be reproduced somewhere else in history with different outcomes. You must distill history into a framework otherwise it's impossible to reason about and understand.
      - benbreen 11y ago
        This seems like a good spot to link to one of my favorite essays on the theme you've raised here - the historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin (of the hedgehog and the fox fame) on "The Concept of Scientific History." (Short version: he argues that there's no such thing). By the way, I'm happy to see such an interesting discussion of my favorite historical topic on HN - thanks. http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf
  - btilly 11y ago
    I deliberately stated a very mild form of the idea because that is what actually seems to have been accepted relatively early on. The stronger idea that we should actually treat people with different beliefs as we would like to be treated in turn took a lot longer. For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actual attempts to kill English kings (most famously the Gunpowder plot) and the Pope kept the stance that Catholics should try to overthrow England's government. The Catholic church maintained that position until 1766. In response, England started treating Catholics better. First in various colonies, and then for England itself with the 1778 Papists Act. Something much closer to equality arrived as you noted in 1829. Atheists got worse treatment. For example they could not testify in UK courts until 1870. And even though atheist Charles Bradlaugh started getting regularly elected in 1880, and he was not allowed to be a member of the House of Commons until 1886. The US was fundamentally no better, and in practice worse despite the Bill of Rights. For example it was not until 1961 that the Supreme Court ruled that atheists could not be barred by their non-belief from things like being a notary public. But for all that we can legitimately criticize about the way these ideas were put in practice, they are worlds better than when Henry VIII took land from Catholics for not recognizing his marriage, his daughter Mary killed Protestants for not recognizing the Pope, the Pope in return tried to convince Catholics to try to kill Elizabeth I, and James 1. Both then passed various laws penalizing Catholics in retaliation. Remember the Bloody Question? "If the Pope should invade England, which would you support? The Queen or the Pope?" Killing people who said, "the Pope" was pretty brutal, but reflected political reality.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      And yet your own hereditary monarch in 2015 has to be an Anglican.
      - JonnieCache 11y ago
        That's been recently changed. Catholics are now allowed, and men no longer take precedence over women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement The whole thing is still, to quote Doug Stanhope, "some dungeons and dragons bullshit", but at least its not immutable even today.
- pluma 11y ago
  This is actually exactly how I've recently heard the Peace of Westphalia[0] described (which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany): it established the idea that nations are independent "wholes" with their own laws, religion and politics, and that that's okay. The ideas encoded in the agreement are basically the reason we think of events like the Crimean secession[1] as an unconstitutional Russian annexation regardless of whether it happened by a public vote or not: even if there was a referendum and even if that referendum was formally valid and the outcome was in favour of the secession, the constitution of the Ukraine forbids the secession and therefore renders the referendum invalid by definition. It's also important to note that these ideas of statehood popped up in the (at the time) Christian world and therefore strongly shaped the face of modern Christianity and the separation of state and church in the West (which even in its worst cases still works better today than it did before the Enlightenment). This didn't happen in the Islamic world, at least not in the same way (though there are examples for church-state separation as in post-WW1 Turkey). I think this provides some insights into why that part of the world's politics is so poorly understood by Westerners (e.g. consider the tribal politics in Afghanistan or the Sunni-Shia conflicts all over the map). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia [1]: Whether it was an annexation or secession and whether it was formally valid or not is a separate debate. There is a lot of evidence indicating that it was, to say the least, influenced by Russia, which would have made its validity doubtful even if it wasn't unconstitutional.
  - derefr 11y ago
    > even if there was a referendum and even if that referendum was formally valid and the outcome was in favour of the secession, the constitution of the Ukraine forbids the secession and therefore renders the referendum invalid by definition. That's kind of weird. What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a constitution, then? I would assume that if every citizen revokes their citizenship to the original country, then the original country ceases to exist, no? (Or rather, retains no more sovereignty than a "country" like Sealand.)
    - voidlogic 11y ago
      >What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a constitution Most constitutions specify processes for amending them, which often could be used to dismantle them.
- jkot 11y ago
  Roman Empire had pretty tolerant culture as well...
  - btilly 11y ago
    The Roman Empire was traditionally willing to tolerate you if you were willing to worship the Emperor as a god. This version of tolerance famously didn't work out very well for Jews and Christians. Particularly since they were OK with private human sacrifice and public executions for entertainment. We owe a lot to the Roman Empire. But I wouldn't romanticize it too much.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Owe? A thousand years of stagnation? A repressive regime that enslaved half the world for the benefit of a handful of their own rich?
      - paganel 11y ago
        What did the Romans ever do for us? In all seriousness, though, we tend to ignore how advanced the Roman civilization was compared to the "barbaric" ones outside of its borders. For example, when the Romans invaded Dacia around year 106 they created a new capital, at Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulpia_Traiana_Sarmizegetusa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulpia_Traiana_Sarmizegetusa), which became a proper Roman city, with an amphitheatre, a forum, several temples, Roman-built villas. The Romans evacuated Dacia and its capital around year 270, and then everything collapsed. Around Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa writing just vanished, for the next 800 years or so there are no archaeological finds involving written texts (either in stone or on the buildings' walls). Stone churches started to get built around year 1100-1200, many of them using stone from the Roman ruins. Theater as an art form would only return to the region around year 1600-1700, that's almost 1500 years after the Romans had left.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        That makes me wonder what the Romans DID to those people, to blast them back to the stone age.
- woodpanel 11y ago
  I can echo the dissent to this view. Not one european nation came out as a turf for religious freedom. Quite the opposite, most nations came out as religiously cleansed. Ethnicity, Religion and Nationhood are different things. Todays meaning of "nationhood" was probably formed in this time of wars. But most of Europe's nations of present day are culturally dominated by one the belligrent religions: Catholic: Italy, Belgium, France, Austria, Ireland, Poland Protestant: Great Britain, Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Baltics Today, there are only two exceptions. Switzerland and Germany. Germany didn't exist as a "nation", but in each of the many German states, it was either one or the other religion. As was the case in Switzerland's Cantons.
  - btilly 11y ago
    There should be no conflict here. The idea arose out of a period of intense conflict. This idea arose as a response to religious conflict, and took a long time to get accepted. It is therefore no surprise that there was a lot of religious cleansing prior to and during the period where the idea formed. More specifically, modern notions of religious freedom generally get traced back to John Locke's Letters Concerning Toleration (1689–92). He was influenced in turn by ideas developed by Baptist theologists. And his sphere of influence includes people like Thomas Jefferson who put freedom of religion into the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    Swiss history can be thought of periods of peace and war. By peace, I mean sending mercenaries to go fight, and burning jews and witches instead of invading the neighboring cantons with a slightly different version of Christianity and pillaging them. Fortunately, the invention of the portable Raclette oven calmed down religious tensions, though it did not lessen the zeal for witch and jew burnings.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    I highly recommend Gellner's Nations and Nationalism on this topic. While not Gospel, it might at least be a good start.
applecore 11y ago
Interesting concept, although the single most significant event of that era would have to be the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  I'd say the Glorious Revolution is right up there with it, as it was such a formative influence in for the American revolutionaries.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  And of our era, 9/11, the beginning of the end of the Westphalian state-based order and signaling a new world order of overlapping authorities and loyalties, from multinational corporations to terrorist organizations. "The Modern Mercenary" by Sean McFate is a good book based on this idea.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    9/11 isn't even close to the beginning of the end of the Westphalian order. The increasing domination of multinational corporations, labor organizations, political movements, terrorist organizations, etc., was widely observed and pointed to as evidence of the progressive decline of the nation-state order for many decades prior to 9/11.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Yeah, you could date it from any time from the end of WW2 onwards, with the establishment of transnational institutions.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      While I don't disagree, it's still true that much (though not all) of trans-national activity still takes place within an overall Westphalian state framework. (And one of the big exceptions--the Middle East--is essentially a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire post-WWI.
chroncilinks 11y ago
Maybe it is a little late in the day but I just read that and I don't think I got anything out of it. Some people say it existed and some say it didn't. What's the point?
- DubiousPusher 11y ago
  When studying history, there is utility in developing and understanding frameworks for grouping historical events. It's also important to understand that these models are often flawed. If you are interested in history as a series of facts, then this notion isn't particularly useful. But if you are curious as to how our modern societies came to be, you will endlessly scour history for patterns demonstrating how our era is different and how it is not from other eras, how the eras leading up to it were different and how similar eras may or may not have flourished in bygone ages.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    It is especially interesting when you consider that the general consensus is that we are entering a period of dramatic climate change, and the crisis/crises in question took place during the "little ice age" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age), another period of dramatic climate change. If you're the type who looks for lessons in history, it raises some obvious questions: are the dislocations, wars and struggles that came from the privation of the little ice age something we'll be seeing in our future too? Are there things about warming that make it more or less prone to these types of problems than global cooling was? Are there mistakes people made back then that we can avoid making?
  - aaronem 11y ago
    > developing and understanding frameworks for grouping historical events This is called "historiography", and were it more commonly taught in US primary and secondary schools, fewer Americans would think of "history" as being dull -- an endless stream of bare facts lacking context is indeed dull as dishwater; it's in the drawing and analysis of narrative that all the interest lies.
tjradcliffe 11y ago
Parker's book on the topic is a good one-volume cover of the history from a global perspective. The climate data are pretty clear on how weird things were, with no shortage of "most extreme ever" events from China to England: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe-Seventeenth/dp/0300208634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434393062&sr=8-1&keywords=global+crisis http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe-Seve... Concepts--all concepts--are made things, and the edges we draw around them are the edges of our attention. People draw those edges in different places, or not at all, depending on their priors. As such, a certain type of person will argue that there wasn't "really" a "general criss" in the 17th century because the panoply of events aren't enough to trigger their edge-detectors, and they feel that their edge-detectors are arbiters of reality. Arguments of this nature are rarely productive. The events happened regardless of what you call them. That the global climate underwent a statistically significant excursion in the 17th century is hard to argue against. That that excursion was also economically significant is likewise difficult to argue against. Unprecedented multi-year runs of poor harvests aren't really something that can be wished away with ideology. Finally, that the economic excursion helped drive political decision making should be relatively uncontroversial, unless one were to argue that politics happens in an economic vacuum. Parker does a good job of emphasizing the contingency of outcomes. People made decisions for reasons that seemed good to them--often of the form "God loves my country, so if I do X, Y will necessarily and certainly happen!"--and results followed for unrelated reasons (often of the form, "Luck.") He also argues that something like 1/3 of the human species died in the crisis, which is fairly astonishing, but given the death tolls for the places where we have data, not entirely unsupportable.
oldpond 11y ago
This is a fascinating period of history. Our modern financial system is born during this period. I'm reading up on Cromwell and the English Civil Wars right now. There is a ton of great Dutch history during this period as well, especially the Dutch East India Company. Thanks for sharing.
lkrubner 11y ago
There are some interesting comparisons between (what the economist Tyler Cowen refers to as) The Great Stagnation Of 1973-now, and The Really Great Stagnation of 1650-1740. Restraining the comparison to the English speaking nations, we can say: 1.) Both episodes begin with a cultural revolution that has no precedent (the arrival of militant Protestantism versus the arrival of the counter-culture of the 1960s) 2.) Both episodes witness a fundamental reassessment of what property is. (The closing of the commons giving rise to the concept of private property, versus the modern rise of intellectual property). 3.) Both episodes see important intellectual innovation, against a background of economic stagnation (Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Boyle, versus the rise of modern genetics --- although, arguably, this is an area where the analogy breaks down, as nothing of the last 50 years seems to match the importance of Newton or Boyle). 4.) Both episodes see a civil rights struggle that fundamentally changes the relationship between the citizen and the state (freedom of religion being the big struggle of the 1600s, freedom from racial discrimination being the struggle of recent times). The Really Great Stagnation ended with the Industrial Revolution. The current stagnation ends with...
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  It probably ends with commercial fusion power or a similar technological gain on power generation. Cheap power makes most of the stuff we use or make much cheaper. Which leads to a major change in the living standard and expectations (imagine access to electricity being seen as a right since power generation would outstrip demand if something like fusion became viable).
  - trhway 11y ago
    it correlates with climate change nicely - the 1650 was the time of the Little Ice Age which significantly affected the production of food and everything else. The fusion power (or similar) would allow to mitigate and finally overcome the current climate change catastrophe (the fact that it moves slowly doesn't make it less serious - just like a huge container ship - the mass/inertia makes for the speed in collision :) which is starting to cause real economic damage (cattle growing in Texas, agriculture in CA for example). And it is just the beginning...
amyjess 11y ago
Anybody interested in the subject should read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. It's an excellent fictionalized account of the time period, focusing on the social and economic transformations (specifically, from a land-based economy and culture to a money-based one), which Stephenson posits is the birth of the modern world.
ginko 11y ago
I guess this is somewhat connected to the concept of the European Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War
Someone 11y ago
So, where is the test for "Distribution of conflicts does not follow a Poisson distribution?" Certainly, that is a necessary condition before one can claim that a period is special in some way. Yes, one can tweak the raw data by adjusting the time period, the estimation of the magnitude and number of conflicts (for example, was the 80-year war a single war? There certainly was a 12-year truce that likely was longer than many periods of formal peace), and by what areas of conflict to include, but that should only make it easier to get a statistically significant result.
agumonkey 11y ago
Is there a crises timeline ? of some kind of transition map ? for periodicity ...
thomasmarriott 11y ago
'Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory'

89 points by benbreen 11y ago

Regardless of what you think about whether these crises were connected, they did give rise to a rather important idea. At its heart, the idea is that, "I won't kill you for your beliefs if you aren't going to kill me for mine." This may seem like common sense today, but historically we only arrived at it after having plenty of opportunity to deal with the aftermath of people being willing to kill each other for having different ideas about whether, for instance, Christianity is what the Catholic Church teaches us that it is. This tolerance gave rise to such ideas as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on. Which were key ideas from the Age of Enlightenment, which ideals influenced the US Constitution and Western culture to this day.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Well, that's a very Protestant, Whiggish view of things. Catholic Emancipation in the UK wasn't complete until 1829 for example. The idea of the Glorious Revolution as ushering in a democratic and free era was really only true if you were an Anglican, slightly less so for Dissenters, and very much less so for Catholics (both in Britain and Ireland). I think a lot of those crises in Europe were just continuations of the Reformation in many respects.
- bgilroy26 11y ago
  Re:whiggish-ness https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2012/two-cheers-for-the-whig-interpretation-of-history https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
  - DubiousPusher 11y ago
    Thanks for posting this. That essay is fantastic. It's actually a perfect complement to that article and the discussion happening in this entire thread. It beautifully highlights the modern historian's crisis. You cannot distill history into a framework because any unique set of events seem to be reproduced somewhere else in history with different outcomes. You must distill history into a framework otherwise it's impossible to reason about and understand.
    - benbreen 11y ago
      This seems like a good spot to link to one of my favorite essays on the theme you've raised here - the historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin (of the hedgehog and the fox fame) on "The Concept of Scientific History." (Short version: he argues that there's no such thing). By the way, I'm happy to see such an interesting discussion of my favorite historical topic on HN - thanks. http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf
- btilly 11y ago
  I deliberately stated a very mild form of the idea because that is what actually seems to have been accepted relatively early on. The stronger idea that we should actually treat people with different beliefs as we would like to be treated in turn took a lot longer. For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actual attempts to kill English kings (most famously the Gunpowder plot) and the Pope kept the stance that Catholics should try to overthrow England's government. The Catholic church maintained that position until 1766. In response, England started treating Catholics better. First in various colonies, and then for England itself with the 1778 Papists Act. Something much closer to equality arrived as you noted in 1829. Atheists got worse treatment. For example they could not testify in UK courts until 1870. And even though atheist Charles Bradlaugh started getting regularly elected in 1880, and he was not allowed to be a member of the House of Commons until 1886. The US was fundamentally no better, and in practice worse despite the Bill of Rights. For example it was not until 1961 that the Supreme Court ruled that atheists could not be barred by their non-belief from things like being a notary public. But for all that we can legitimately criticize about the way these ideas were put in practice, they are worlds better than when Henry VIII took land from Catholics for not recognizing his marriage, his daughter Mary killed Protestants for not recognizing the Pope, the Pope in return tried to convince Catholics to try to kill Elizabeth I, and James 1. Both then passed various laws penalizing Catholics in retaliation. Remember the Bloody Question? "If the Pope should invade England, which would you support? The Queen or the Pope?" Killing people who said, "the Pope" was pretty brutal, but reflected political reality.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    And yet your own hereditary monarch in 2015 has to be an Anglican.
    - JonnieCache 11y ago
      That's been recently changed. Catholics are now allowed, and men no longer take precedence over women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement The whole thing is still, to quote Doug Stanhope, "some dungeons and dragons bullshit", but at least its not immutable even today.
pluma 11y ago
This is actually exactly how I've recently heard the Peace of Westphalia[0] described (which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany): it established the idea that nations are independent "wholes" with their own laws, religion and politics, and that that's okay. The ideas encoded in the agreement are basically the reason we think of events like the Crimean secession[1] as an unconstitutional Russian annexation regardless of whether it happened by a public vote or not: even if there was a referendum and even if that referendum was formally valid and the outcome was in favour of the secession, the constitution of the Ukraine forbids the secession and therefore renders the referendum invalid by definition. It's also important to note that these ideas of statehood popped up in the (at the time) Christian world and therefore strongly shaped the face of modern Christianity and the separation of state and church in the West (which even in its worst cases still works better today than it did before the Enlightenment). This didn't happen in the Islamic world, at least not in the same way (though there are examples for church-state separation as in post-WW1 Turkey). I think this provides some insights into why that part of the world's politics is so poorly understood by Westerners (e.g. consider the tribal politics in Afghanistan or the Sunni-Shia conflicts all over the map). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia [1]: Whether it was an annexation or secession and whether it was formally valid or not is a separate debate. There is a lot of evidence indicating that it was, to say the least, influenced by Russia, which would have made its validity doubtful even if it wasn't unconstitutional.
- derefr 11y ago
  > even if there was a referendum and even if that referendum was formally valid and the outcome was in favour of the secession, the constitution of the Ukraine forbids the secession and therefore renders the referendum invalid by definition. That's kind of weird. What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a constitution, then? I would assume that if every citizen revokes their citizenship to the original country, then the original country ceases to exist, no? (Or rather, retains no more sovereignty than a "country" like Sealand.)
  - voidlogic 11y ago
    >What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a constitution Most constitutions specify processes for amending them, which often could be used to dismantle them.
jkot 11y ago
Roman Empire had pretty tolerant culture as well...
- btilly 11y ago
  The Roman Empire was traditionally willing to tolerate you if you were willing to worship the Emperor as a god. This version of tolerance famously didn't work out very well for Jews and Christians. Particularly since they were OK with private human sacrifice and public executions for entertainment. We owe a lot to the Roman Empire. But I wouldn't romanticize it too much.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Owe? A thousand years of stagnation? A repressive regime that enslaved half the world for the benefit of a handful of their own rich?
    - paganel 11y ago
      What did the Romans ever do for us? In all seriousness, though, we tend to ignore how advanced the Roman civilization was compared to the "barbaric" ones outside of its borders. For example, when the Romans invaded Dacia around year 106 they created a new capital, at Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulpia_Traiana_Sarmizegetusa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulpia_Traiana_Sarmizegetusa), which became a proper Roman city, with an amphitheatre, a forum, several temples, Roman-built villas. The Romans evacuated Dacia and its capital around year 270, and then everything collapsed. Around Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa writing just vanished, for the next 800 years or so there are no archaeological finds involving written texts (either in stone or on the buildings' walls). Stone churches started to get built around year 1100-1200, many of them using stone from the Roman ruins. Theater as an art form would only return to the region around year 1600-1700, that's almost 1500 years after the Romans had left.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        That makes me wonder what the Romans DID to those people, to blast them back to the stone age.
woodpanel 11y ago
I can echo the dissent to this view. Not one european nation came out as a turf for religious freedom. Quite the opposite, most nations came out as religiously cleansed. Ethnicity, Religion and Nationhood are different things. Todays meaning of "nationhood" was probably formed in this time of wars. But most of Europe's nations of present day are culturally dominated by one the belligrent religions: Catholic: Italy, Belgium, France, Austria, Ireland, Poland Protestant: Great Britain, Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Baltics Today, there are only two exceptions. Switzerland and Germany. Germany didn't exist as a "nation", but in each of the many German states, it was either one or the other religion. As was the case in Switzerland's Cantons.
- btilly 11y ago
  There should be no conflict here. The idea arose out of a period of intense conflict. This idea arose as a response to religious conflict, and took a long time to get accepted. It is therefore no surprise that there was a lot of religious cleansing prior to and during the period where the idea formed. More specifically, modern notions of religious freedom generally get traced back to John Locke's Letters Concerning Toleration (1689–92). He was influenced in turn by ideas developed by Baptist theologists. And his sphere of influence includes people like Thomas Jefferson who put freedom of religion into the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  Swiss history can be thought of periods of peace and war. By peace, I mean sending mercenaries to go fight, and burning jews and witches instead of invading the neighboring cantons with a slightly different version of Christianity and pillaging them. Fortunately, the invention of the portable Raclette oven calmed down religious tensions, though it did not lessen the zeal for witch and jew burnings.
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  I highly recommend Gellner's Nations and Nationalism on this topic. While not Gospel, it might at least be a good start.

applecore 11y ago

Interesting concept, although the single most significant event of that era would have to be the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
I'd say the Glorious Revolution is right up there with it, as it was such a formative influence in for the American revolutionaries.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
And of our era, 9/11, the beginning of the end of the Westphalian state-based order and signaling a new world order of overlapping authorities and loyalties, from multinational corporations to terrorist organizations. "The Modern Mercenary" by Sean McFate is a good book based on this idea.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  9/11 isn't even close to the beginning of the end of the Westphalian order. The increasing domination of multinational corporations, labor organizations, political movements, terrorist organizations, etc., was widely observed and pointed to as evidence of the progressive decline of the nation-state order for many decades prior to 9/11.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Yeah, you could date it from any time from the end of WW2 onwards, with the establishment of transnational institutions.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    While I don't disagree, it's still true that much (though not all) of trans-national activity still takes place within an overall Westphalian state framework. (And one of the big exceptions--the Middle East--is essentially a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire post-WWI.

chroncilinks 11y ago

Maybe it is a little late in the day but I just read that and I don't think I got anything out of it. Some people say it existed and some say it didn't. What's the point?

DubiousPusher 11y ago
When studying history, there is utility in developing and understanding frameworks for grouping historical events. It's also important to understand that these models are often flawed. If you are interested in history as a series of facts, then this notion isn't particularly useful. But if you are curious as to how our modern societies came to be, you will endlessly scour history for patterns demonstrating how our era is different and how it is not from other eras, how the eras leading up to it were different and how similar eras may or may not have flourished in bygone ages.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  It is especially interesting when you consider that the general consensus is that we are entering a period of dramatic climate change, and the crisis/crises in question took place during the "little ice age" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age), another period of dramatic climate change. If you're the type who looks for lessons in history, it raises some obvious questions: are the dislocations, wars and struggles that came from the privation of the little ice age something we'll be seeing in our future too? Are there things about warming that make it more or less prone to these types of problems than global cooling was? Are there mistakes people made back then that we can avoid making?
- aaronem 11y ago
  > developing and understanding frameworks for grouping historical events This is called "historiography", and were it more commonly taught in US primary and secondary schools, fewer Americans would think of "history" as being dull -- an endless stream of bare facts lacking context is indeed dull as dishwater; it's in the drawing and analysis of narrative that all the interest lies.

tjradcliffe 11y ago

Parker's book on the topic is a good one-volume cover of the history from a global perspective. The climate data are pretty clear on how weird things were, with no shortage of "most extreme ever" events from China to England: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe-Seventeenth/dp/0300208634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434393062&sr=8-1&keywords=global+crisis http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe-Seve... Concepts--all concepts--are made things, and the edges we draw around them are the edges of our attention. People draw those edges in different places, or not at all, depending on their priors. As such, a certain type of person will argue that there wasn't "really" a "general criss" in the 17th century because the panoply of events aren't enough to trigger their edge-detectors, and they feel that their edge-detectors are arbiters of reality. Arguments of this nature are rarely productive. The events happened regardless of what you call them. That the global climate underwent a statistically significant excursion in the 17th century is hard to argue against. That that excursion was also economically significant is likewise difficult to argue against. Unprecedented multi-year runs of poor harvests aren't really something that can be wished away with ideology. Finally, that the economic excursion helped drive political decision making should be relatively uncontroversial, unless one were to argue that politics happens in an economic vacuum. Parker does a good job of emphasizing the contingency of outcomes. People made decisions for reasons that seemed good to them--often of the form "God loves my country, so if I do X, Y will necessarily and certainly happen!"--and results followed for unrelated reasons (often of the form, "Luck.") He also argues that something like 1/3 of the human species died in the crisis, which is fairly astonishing, but given the death tolls for the places where we have data, not entirely unsupportable.

oldpond 11y ago

This is a fascinating period of history. Our modern financial system is born during this period. I'm reading up on Cromwell and the English Civil Wars right now. There is a ton of great Dutch history during this period as well, especially the Dutch East India Company. Thanks for sharing.

lkrubner 11y ago

There are some interesting comparisons between (what the economist Tyler Cowen refers to as) The Great Stagnation Of 1973-now, and The Really Great Stagnation of 1650-1740. Restraining the comparison to the English speaking nations, we can say: 1.) Both episodes begin with a cultural revolution that has no precedent (the arrival of militant Protestantism versus the arrival of the counter-culture of the 1960s) 2.) Both episodes witness a fundamental reassessment of what property is. (The closing of the commons giving rise to the concept of private property, versus the modern rise of intellectual property). 3.) Both episodes see important intellectual innovation, against a background of economic stagnation (Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Boyle, versus the rise of modern genetics --- although, arguably, this is an area where the analogy breaks down, as nothing of the last 50 years seems to match the importance of Newton or Boyle). 4.) Both episodes see a civil rights struggle that fundamentally changes the relationship between the citizen and the state (freedom of religion being the big struggle of the 1600s, freedom from racial discrimination being the struggle of recent times). The Really Great Stagnation ended with the Industrial Revolution. The current stagnation ends with...

norea-armozel 11y ago
It probably ends with commercial fusion power or a similar technological gain on power generation. Cheap power makes most of the stuff we use or make much cheaper. Which leads to a major change in the living standard and expectations (imagine access to electricity being seen as a right since power generation would outstrip demand if something like fusion became viable).
- trhway 11y ago
  it correlates with climate change nicely - the 1650 was the time of the Little Ice Age which significantly affected the production of food and everything else. The fusion power (or similar) would allow to mitigate and finally overcome the current climate change catastrophe (the fact that it moves slowly doesn't make it less serious - just like a huge container ship - the mass/inertia makes for the speed in collision :) which is starting to cause real economic damage (cattle growing in Texas, agriculture in CA for example). And it is just the beginning...

amyjess 11y ago

Anybody interested in the subject should read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. It's an excellent fictionalized account of the time period, focusing on the social and economic transformations (specifically, from a land-based economy and culture to a money-based one), which Stephenson posits is the birth of the modern world.

ginko 11y ago

I guess this is somewhat connected to the concept of the European Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War

Someone 11y ago

So, where is the test for "Distribution of conflicts does not follow a Poisson distribution?" Certainly, that is a necessary condition before one can claim that a period is special in some way. Yes, one can tweak the raw data by adjusting the time period, the estimation of the magnitude and number of conflicts (for example, was the 80-year war a single war? There certainly was a 12-year truce that likely was longer than many periods of formal peace), and by what areas of conflict to include, but that should only make it easier to get a statistically significant result.

agumonkey 11y ago

Is there a crises timeline ? of some kind of transition map ? for periodicity ...

thomasmarriott 11y ago

'Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory'