Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

Author:Geoffrey Parker [Parker, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, World, Modern, 17th Century
ISBN: 9780300219364
Google: 1GMlDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300219369
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-06-02T00:39:25.575000+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Americas, Africa and Australia1

Most of the surviving human and natural archives from the mid-seventeenth century relate to Europe and Asia. Despite the immense size of the other three inhabited continents (16 million square miles for North and South America, almost 12 million for Africa, and 3 million for Australia), the human archive is sparse, because few indigenous populations left written or pictorial records that can be precisely dated. Even where an abundant natural archive (above all tree rings) reveals the footprint of the Little Ice Age, its human impact remains obscure. Thus many Europeans in North America realized that the indigenous population was declining rapidly – in New Mexico, ‘where three Pecos had lived in 1622, only two lived in 1641 and only one in 1694’; in New England ‘by the 1640s the number of Iroquois (and of their Indian neighbours) had probably already been halved’ – but none suggested the probable causes.2 In Australia, only archaeology and the natural archive provide reliable testimony but (as elsewhere) much of it lacks chronological precision. Historians can reconstruct the experience of humans living in these areas in the seventeenth century only when literate residents or travellers from other regions – most of them Europeans – compiled written sources that have survived.

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