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.
A Great Techno-Thriller with an Unsatisfactory Ending
"*** Contains Major Spoilers *** Style: An interesting read that goes by quickly. The story is presented as something somewhere between a government report and a standard third-person fiction novel. Michael Crichton includes (relative to the total length of the novel) a fair bit of detail about the military/government processes and scientific procedures conducted, which is not without some inaccuracies (though I'm not sure how much of this is due to the difference in knowledge and technology now vs 1969). Some people may find these bits dry or boring, but personally I tend to enjoy this kind of exposition, and their inclusion doesn't feel out of place. Characters: In terms of character depth and development, this isn't really the story for it. Most of what we know about the characters is told to us by the omniscient narrator during their introductions, rather than shown to us through their actions or interactions with each other. For the format and length of the novel, this isn't a huge issue, but it doesn't give the reader much opportunity to feel truly connected with the characters. Plot: Over the course of events, we get a really disturbing idea of what this pathogen is capable of, wiping out nearly an entire town in moments -in some pretty horrific ways- and later taking down a plane and its pilot in an equally horrifying manner. This all happens in the background to the main crew attempting to determine what the pathogen is, how it kills, and how to stop it. Throughout their endeavors, we get the ominous voice of the narrator calling out their grievous mistakes and details they've overlooked, building the suspense for an inevitably devastating outcome. . . that never happens. The extremely deadly, rapidly-mutating, unlike-anything-ever-seen-before pathogen escapes from the lab and. . . rapidly mutates itself into something completely harmless and floats away. It's monitored for a bit, and determined not to be a threat. Whew. Great for humanity. A *bit* anticlimactic for the reader. Overall, I enjoyed the story and was hooked, despite a couple scientific inaccuracies (which mostly aren't obvious unless you have a background in those areas) and poorly explained away plot devices (ie. the arm), but given it's a work of fiction and not a textbook, I'm not too bothered by those. The ending is what loses a star for me. Like I said earlier, it's a quick and easy read that doesn't take much commitment, and I enjoyed the writing style, but that ending really undermines the whole story. Maybe that was the point: the government's willingness to go nuclear (albiet, on their own soil, in a remote location, where everyone is already dead anyway, and again in the lab containing pretty much only the main characters) would've been more devastating than just leaving it alone? I'm not convinced, but maybe I'm missing some of the context of this taking place during the Cold War, for which I was not alive to experience. Either way, if it had a stronger ending, I might've given it another star."
