Jo Guldi and David Armitage's History Manifesto has recently put forward a convincing case for historians to think more explicitly about developments over longer time spans; about how we can contribute to the ‘big narratives’ of our time (such as inequality, security and climate change); and about the role that history plays in contemporary societies. Crises in Economic and Social History’s perspective on ‘crises’ conforms to all three of these suggestions. It offers a wide range of comparisons across temporal, thematic and geographic lines, and discusses issues of relevance today, such as financial collapses, epidemic diseases, and environmental degradation. It also considers the value of comparing medieval crises with those occurring after the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and even crises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The point of departure for the book is the concept of ‘crisis’ and its application in different historical social contexts. One major concern of the excellent introduction, and throughout many of the chapters, is to what extent a set of circumstances can be referred to as a crisis if society does not perceive it as such. There may be a Little Ice Age, or repeated plagues, or a bullion shortage, or extreme inequality, or decreasing woodland resources, to name just a few potential circumstances. But if the society experiencing it does not notice, can it be deemed as a crisis? The book makes a valid claim for more interaction between historians of economy and environment with historians of culture and representation. Cohesion is achieved through the separation of crisis as defined by set, definable and tangible indicators, such as the ‘peaks and troughs’ approach of Mark and Catherine Casson; and crisis as something fluid and dependent on social and cultural context. Admittedly this is not entirely original. In the blossoming research literature on historical disasters, for example, the most progress in the past 15 years has arguably been made through the cultural approach focusing on past societies’ perception of hazards and shocks.
One of the book's main themes is how pre-modern responses to crises were not always that different to responses in later periods. Pamela Nightingale shows that in the medieval period, credit was particularly sensitive to shocks that made potential creditors doubt that payment was forthcoming, and this apparently differs little from financial crises in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, according to the picture presented by Matthew Hollow and Ranald Michie. Paul Warde shows that the rhetoric of timber resource shortage in early modern Europe was entirely comparable with the 1860s’ logging crises in North America, and even with the oil crises of the late twentieth century. Philip Slavin draws upon some strong similarities between responses to animal disease epidemics of the Middle Ages, namely sheep scab in 1279–1280 and rinderpest in 1319–1320, and the same diseases after the Industrial Revolution. The most starkly revisionist chapter of the book, however, is that of Samuel Cohn. Cohn's wide reading and knowledge of epidemic diseases past and present allow for a broad comparative approach. He argues that history has not been one long linear march from ‘less tolerant’ to ‘more enlightened’ social responses to epidemic diseases, guided by improvements in scientific or medical knowledge. Diseases of antiquity and the Middle Ages did not necessarily produce more extreme reactions than those seen after the Laboratory Revolution of the late nineteenth century.
Another of the book's themes centres on blame: to what extent is the process of finding responsible parties for the crisis an actual marker of coping? John Singleton asserts a prominent role to apportioning blame in his Disaster Management Cycle, seeing it as an inevitable phase of dealing with hazards and shocks that have disastrous consequences. Many of the chapters point to specific examples of blame. In Pavla Jirkoká’s chapter, the application of anti-plague measures by the urban government of Prague during the severe epidemic of 1680 apparently had an anti-Semitic character, with overly harsh consequences for the Jewish quarter. Josette Duncan in her chapter on Malta reflects upon a common theme surrounding cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century: accusations by the poor that the medical profession and governments were deliberately infecting people.
Hollow and Michie show the connection between financial crises and ‘contagious’ mass panic. Blame was probably exacerbated by the fact that hazards and shocks clearly did not only have aggregate repercussions for economies and societies, but redistributive powers too. Chapters from Cinzia Lorandini and John Lee show that crises in the silk and cloth industries, respectively, provided windows of opportunity for select segments of society. An obvious issue to explore further would be the potential correlation between sharpness and intensity of the redistributive effect, and the severity of blame that potentially ensues. Yet, remembering Cohn's chapter, we are left asking whether blame itself really is an inevitable stage of societal response to crisis. Cohn has revised a conception entrenched within the historiography: that blame, persecution and hatred were inevitable products of societal interaction with severe epidemics. In fact, similarly lethal, mysterious, gruesome, contagious, or fast-spreading diseases could at times produce no kind of blame – or even cohesive and compassionate responses. Does the absence of blame then mean that a severe mortality or financial shock cannot be considered a crisis?
All scholars of environmental, public health and financial crises, modern or historical, should take a look at this book, not least for the fine introductory chapter that draws upon a wide and diverse range of reading from economics, history, sociology and philosophy to ask significant questions about current approaches to the study of crises. The issue of whether crises are something tangible and definitive or only recognised contextually is not really resolved, only contemplated. But perhaps that is as it should be. Both approaches have their merits, and this book urges us to be less lazy with the vague application of the term ‘crisis’. This should aid systematic comparative research in future.
