The Price of Collapse by Timothy Brook

The Price of Collapse by Timothy Brook

How climate change ushered in the collapse of one of history’s mighty empires In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound. The Price of Collapse provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule. The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadliest phase of the Little Ice Age, when temperatures and rainfall plunged and world economies buckled. Timothy Brook draws on the history of grain prices to paint a gripping portrait of the final tumultuous years of a once-great dynasty. He explores how global trade networks that increasingly moved silver into China may have affected prices and describes the daily struggle to survive amid grain shortages and famine. By the early 1640s, as the subjects of the Ming found themselves caught in a deadly combination of cold and drought that defied all attempts to stave off disaster, the Ming price regime collapsed, and with it the Ming political regime. A masterful work of scholarship, The Price of Collapse reconstructs the experience of ordinary people under the immense pressure of unaffordable prices as their country slid from prosperity to calamity and shows how the market mediated the relationship between an empire and the climate that turned against it.

"The Price of Collapse is a little gem"---Rana Mitter, Literary Review
"The subject of Timothy Brook’s book, the demise of the Ming dynasty, offers a chilling warning of a cost-of-living crisis driven by climate-induced food precarity."---Peter Coates, Times Literary Supplement

Timothy Brook is professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the British Academy. His many books include Great State, Mr. Selden’s Map of China, and Vermeer’s Hat.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780691250403
ISBN 10	0691250405
Titel	The Price of Collapse
Autor	Timothy Brook
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Princeton University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2023-11-21
Seitenanzahl	256
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar