Since the 1990s historians have reconceptualized China's “late imperial” period as one of “early modernity,” which has entailed a shift in focus toward China's relationship to global forces that spanned the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Timothy Brook's The Price of Collapse exemplifies this turn toward situating “China in a context greater than itself” (x).
Brook's central thesis is that the collapse of the Ming “cannot be explained in the absence of climate and human responses to climate” (x). A climatic cooling event in the northern hemisphere known as the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–1850)—particularly, the Spörer (c. 1450–1550) and Maunder (c. 1645–1715) Minimums—were the deep currents that structured historical change at both ends of Eurasia over the longue durée.
In support of this thesis Brook relies upon grain prices as proxy indicators of climate change. He has spent decades gleaning price data from dynastic histories, legal and administrative compendia,...
