Book Review: The Price of Collapse

Brook, Timothy. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China. (Princeton University Press, 2023) Kindle Ebook.

Short version: an intriguing combination price and environmental history of the end of the Ming Dynasty in China.

Long version: I’ve read a fair amount about the deepening of the Little Ice Age between 1580-1650 or so, and the havoc it contributed to. However, with two exceptions (Geoffrey Parker’s magnificent summary history, Sam White’s work on the Ottoman Empire), they have focused on Europe, because that’s where sources are the most easily available to English and German-speaking researchers. Timothy Brook is a historian of finance and trade, with one foot in Europe and one in China. I’ve used his earlier work on Imperial China, and Vermeer’s Hat when I look at global trade and China, but this one intrigued me, since it’s closer to my home turf of environmental history.

He begins with the basic economy of China, the coinage and what were staple goods, and who bought what with either copper or silver. Actually, he begins with a description of the worst point of the collapse of the Ming and of China’s weather, in the early 1640s. Historians have estimated that parts of China lost up to 90% of their population, and the empire as a whole suffered a 40-50% population drop between 1600-1650, in large part because of a series of weather events (droughts, floods, the coldest weather recorded in Chinese history) that led to civil unrest and the outbreak of plagues. Brooks focuses on the smaller scale – what did these events do to the cost of living, and how can we tell? Prices are the story of the relationship of society and goods. All the Chinese sources agree that prices for grain and meat rose in the first half of the 1600s. Why?

Here Brook shifts his focus away from China’s politics and internal economy to look at the global trade system. One theory for the inflation that affected much of Western Europe (and China) in the period 1580-1650 was pure currency inflation, an excess of silver in particular being “dumped” by Spain in its wars with the Netherlands and then the Thirty Years War, and silver pouring into China as part of the global trade networks. It is true that Spanish government officials complained because silver went straight from Peru to the Philippines and thence to China, or straight from the Netherlands to China, in exchange for goods. However, detailed work on European prices and markets has shown that the “excess” silver was not the sole cause for the price revolution of the Seventeenth Century. Nor was it the reason for price surges in China, in part because of how limited the range of exchange goods were and how they tended to concentrate in a small part of the enormous Chinese economy. Silver stayed toward the top of the economy, with the government and a comparatively limited number of merchant families. Older gentry families complained about the neuveau riche bidding up the price of antiques and old books without truly appreciating the art and literature contained in them. (Merchants were the bottom of the Confucian scale of social merit, even if they came in near the top of the economic pyramid.) I found this chapter very useful, although not for environmental history.

“At last” we got to the actual environmental history. Brook traces prices and weather events. Rice and wheat rose the most steeply, but millet, barley, soy beans, and other edibles also rose. The prices for people* declined as times grew harder. That was, if grain and pigs and chickens could be found at all. Some places lost crops for several years in a row, so even the seed grain became scarce. Money meant nothing if there was nothing to buy it with. One suspects that in some cases, the severity of events was even worse than recorded, because Chinese bureaucrats tended to ignore bad things, or at most allude to them then pass on, lest they grow worse or repeat**. Brook makes the point again that prices are not strictly tied to pure scarcity or abundance, but also how society and different layers of a society value things. When what had been animal fodder suddenly becomes a highly-desired food for people, times are very, very hard. Only after Qing price controls and a longer span of improved weather conditions did prices settle and life improve for the Chinese. And even then, prices rose steadily until the next drought and crop failures, and scarcity-inspired price spikes (and civil war, and …)

The final chapter is a summary, a study in other prices, and an attempt to fit China’s experience into various economic theories. Brook favors David Hackett Fischer’s Great Wave idea, although as Brook points out, China’s story isn’t a perfect match. One suspects that Europe wasn’t exactly the same fit, either, now that we know more than we did when the Great Wave was proposed, but the model serves as a starting point. Fischer doesn’t look at scarcity of goods as an inflation driver, because of his focus. In the case of the Ming, historians must take that into account, or the economy at the time of the fall of the dynasty makes little sense.

Brook writes very well. I’m not a historian of prices and trade, and in my opinion, the book would benefit from charts comparing the values of copper and silver. How prices were recorded jumped from copper cash to silver pennies to silver taels and back, and keeping the rough exchange rates in mind was not easy for me. However, that doesn’t undermine the basic work and ideas that Brook is trying to convey. It really helps if you are roughly familiar with European and Chinese history of this period (the Spanish wars, an overview of colonial history and mercantilism, that sort of thing) and what happened when the sun went “ZZZzzzzzzzzzz” while volcanoes went “kerBLOOYYYY!!!” during this time.

I’d recommend the book for people interested in global trade and currency shifts, how we track the effects of climate change on real people if we don’t have diaries and similar accounts, and people who want to learn more about the Ming-Qing transition period. It’s not a fun time in world history, especially for those who survived it, but it is fascinating to see how interconnections played out, and which governments fared better than others. Brook builds on Parker to an extent, but you don’t have to have read either Parker or Hackett Fischer to appreciate this book. It does require a little concentration and quiet to read and follow, but that’s due to the subject, not the writing style.

FTC Disclaimer: I purchased this book for my own use, and received no remuneration from the author or publisher for this review.

*Brook does not discuss slavery in China, but given that parents sold children, and one could purchase musicians and servants, not just pay for their labor, it was present.

**This tendency goes back to the oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty. Telling one’s boss bad news has never been popular.