What We Are Reading Today: The Price of Collapse by Timothy Brook

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-17th 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.
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.