Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2013
Selected as a
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 in the History, Geography, & Area Studies Category
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE), in the European & World History category
Winner of the Society for Military History 2014 Distinguished Book Award for the best book-length publication in English on non-United States military history
"Geoffrey Parker's
Global Crisis is at once a revelation and a provocation. By examining a period of unusual climatic perturbation Parker helps us better understand our own era of climate change. Few indeed are the works of history that are so urgently relevant to the present and the future."—Amitav Ghosh, author of
The Great Derangement "Geoffrey Parker has deployed the human archive for climate change during the seventeenth century in a masterly synthesis of history and paleoclimatology that helps us redefine the impact of the Little Ice Age on humanity.
The Global Crisis is a beautifully written, masterly work of multidisciplinary history, which draws on an amazing range of sources. Parker’s work opens up exciting new avenues for historical inquiry and has direct relevance to today’s debates over climate change and humanity."—Brian Fagan, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of
The Little Ice Age "Geoffrey Parker’s
Global Crisis is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to write world history "from the bottom up". Based on long decades of work, and eschewing the facile solution of just drawing on secondary literature, Parker once more shows his grasp of varied archives and texts for which he is celebrated. He draws them together around a complex yet powerful thesis linking climate, military power and political change in the seventeenth century. Learned and argumentative, yet written with subtlety, wit and panache, his book will set the bar for the next generation of students and scholars who want to write history on this scale."—Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California at Los Angeles
"Parker has given us the most profound and global account of the pivotal seventeenth century, from its revolutions and rebellions to scientific and constitutional breakthroughs. As we enter a new era of global climate change, this gripping book provides a wondrous portrait of a similar age and a stern warning."—Jack A. Goldstone, author of
Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500-1850 "A world-altering force [that] has been emerging, one larger, more devastating, and more definitive than the any other 'turn' in recent historiography: 'I speak of climate change—or climate collapse—and all of its related global transformations.'"—Julia Adeney Thomas, American Historical Review