In 2005, the international reinsurance company Munich Re became one of the earliest to offer their corporate and institutional clients protection against the risks resulting from climate change. Notwithstanding political controversy about the scientific consensus on global warming, reinsurers (i.e., insurers of insurance companies) have been making use of climate science, combining it with actuarial science to calculate the short-, medium-, and long-range liabilities of extreme weather in the future. With these looming threats in mind, Geoffrey Parker looks backwards in this panoramic history, but takes a similar approach to analyzing natural and human disasters by drawing on the environmental sciences. Over twenty-two chapters divided into five sections, Parker methodically integrates the “natural archive” (xvi) of material evidence derived from historical climatology (e.g., ice core samples, tree-ring data, volcanic deposits) with the “human archive” (xvii) of more traditional primary sources (official records, diaries, publications, paintings, archaeology), focusing on the anomalous weather of the seventeenth century, mainly across Europe and Asia.

During the Little Ice Age, which lasted between roughly 1250 and 1850, glaciers around the North Pole expanded and caused unusually severe weather around the globe. Some of the worst and best-documented conditions occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, which experienced a stretch of exceptionally cold weather from the 1640s through 1690s. Parker examines how societies throughout the world responded—or, more often, failed to respond adequately—to changing climatic conditions. He argues that Europe's “General Crisis” was a global phenomenon influenced by the direct and indirect consequences of bad weather: poor harvests, dearth, famine, drought, fire, epidemic disease, economic and demographic decline, social unrest, revolts, and ongoing war. While pointing to the frequently crucial role of climate and weather in exacerbating these problems, Parker emphatically rejects environmental determinism. Instead, he attributes the crises to what he repeatedly calls a “fatal synergy” (xxii–xxix) between climatic change and the intransigence of most ruling elites, which together intensified destruction, violence, and suffering. In his judgment, authoritarian Tokugawa Japan was the exception, the only early modern state to “get it right” (the title of chapter 16 is “Getting It Right”) by taking effective measures to invest in infrastructure and avoid foreign conflicts. Parker notes that the “dark continents” of the Americas, Africa, and Australia did not experience the global crisis in the same ways, or at least not in ways that he was able to recover using the same methodology.

Readers of this journal are likely to be particularly interested in Parker's treatment of the General Crisis and the Thirty Years' War, including Parker's reassessment of his own previous work on these topics. In chapters 8 and 19, weather and climate are loosely correlated with key historical moments. The Defenestration of Prague of 1618 and the Swiss peasant revolt of 1653, for example, both followed harvest failures and rising food prices due, in part, to cold and wet weather in preceding summers. Since conditions of global cooling persisted through the Peace of Westphalia and for decades afterwards, Parker's narrative of the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe shows that climate was mainly an intensifier of—never a crucial factor in causing—social conflict, uprisings, and military violence. More striking are the ways in which the book connects synchronic European and Asian events. The subtle but significant drop in average temperatures during the Little Ice Age was global, but its particular chronology and material effects varied by region. Parker is simultaneously attentive to this local specificity and effective in showing commonalities in the historical consequences of cooling trends in disparate places—for example, by comparing population loss among elites in the German states and Ming China, or the relationship between European calamities and Ottoman fortunes.

Despite its heft, the book's elegant and witty prose should make it not only an engaging survey for scholars less familiar with the climatology of the Little Ice Age, but also—and more important—a persuasive rejoinder to recent attempts to diminish the value of this period of global climate change for reinterpreting major problems of broad interest to historians (for this debate, see the special issue, “The Little Ice Age: Climate and History Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45, no. 3 [2014]). In a book of this scope, it is impressive that Parker draws heavily on his own interpretation of original and translated primary sources. But in discussing the history of climate knowledge, he might have sharpened his comments about early modern discussions of climate and weather by consulting the burgeoning secondary literature on this topic. The uncharacteristically anachronistic observation that “Europe's scientists had less success when they tried to understand and explain the Little Ice Age” (660–61), a long-term pattern that modern scientists only began to uncover in the 1970s, is troubling precisely because Global Crisis is otherwise an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship. Moreover, even the most up-to-date climate science is equivocal on many aspects of global cooling. As scientific researchers are generating more refined data about the local manifestations of the Little Ice Age and its predecessor, the so-called Medieval Warm Period, the precise causes of such climatic instability and shifts continue to elude them. It is also a puzzling statement given that Parker hopes to convince not only scholars but also a broad audience of citizens and policymakers that the political, economic, and social history of the seventeenth-century can be used to reflect on the need to respond preemptively to contemporary climate warming—even in the absence of absolutely certain knowledge about such change or about exactly when, how, and where it will manifest itself. In this sense, since climate change has become a subject of public attention and debate, the most important contribution of Parker's book might well be the model it offers of how historians can engage with the natural sciences as they think about how to respond to the current global crisis.