Ming observers of Ming decline: some Chinese views on the “seventeenth century crisis” in comparative perspective

Abstract

Most students of Middle Eastern history in the West will probably recognize the title of this paper as an allusion to Bernard Lewis's well-known article “Ottoman observers of Ottoman decline”. The allusion is meant to be more than a mere play on words, however, for Professor Lewis's discussion of the reactions of Ottoman statesmen to the crises that rocked their society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries contains much that is relevant to an understanding of Chinese reactions to similar crises in the Ming (1368–1644) empire at about the same time. Indeed, whether or not one accepts the still controversial notion that there was a “general crisis” in seventeenth-century world economic and political history, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that during the period from approximately 1550 to 1680, a revolution in world monetary history, sharp fluctuations in the levels of international and domestic trade, dramatic increases in governmental expenditure, significant changes in the growth rates and geographical distribution of population, deteriorating climatic conditions, and outbreaks of epidemic disease affected many economies, including those of the Ming, Ottoman, and Spanish empires, in ways that rulers, officials, clerics, and political commentators from London to Edo found deeply disturbing.