What's Timothy Brook's Approach to Writing about China?

You are watching Prof Tim Brook from British Columbia University discuss his newly-published book "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China". This Zoom webinar organised by the Manchester China Institute (MCI) took place on Tuesday, 12 March 2024, and was moderated by Dr Rian Thum from the University of Manchester.
NOTE: We respect the right to academic freedom. Speakers' opinions are entirely their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organisers.
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𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀
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.
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𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Prof Timothy Brook is a historian of China whose work has focused on the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but extends to issues that span the period from the Mongol occupation of China in the 13th century to the Japanese occupation of China in the 20th. In addition to serving as the general editor of Harvard University Press’ History of Imperial China, he has published extensively on China in the world. A co-edited volume on the inter-polity relations of Inner and East Asia, Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His most recent book, Great State: China and the World, appeared in Britain and France (the French edition under the title of Le Léopard de Kubilai Khan) in September 2019 and on this side of the Atlantic by HarperCollins in March 2020. The French edition was awarded the Grand Prix des Rendez-vous de l’Histoire in October 2020.
Dr Rian Thum is MCI's interim Teaching Director and Senior Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching are generally concerned with the interpenetration of China and the Muslim World. Since 1999, he has regularly conducted field research in Xinjiang and other areas of China with large Muslim populations, both Uyghur- and Chinese-speaking.
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𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗮 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗲 | 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀
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