The General Crisis

The General Crisis is a term used by some historians to describe an alleged period of widespread regional conflict and instability that occurred from the early 17th century to the early 18th century in Europe, and in more recent historiography in the world at large.

The concept of a general 17th-century crisis was, by 1990, thought by historian Niels Steensgaard to be part of a superseded historiographic debate lasting from 1954 to 1978.

Since the mid-20th century, some scholars have proposed widely different definitions, causes, events, periodisations and geographical applications of a 'General Crisis', disagreeing with each other in debates. Other scholars have rejected the various concepts of a General Crisis altogether, claiming there was no such generalised phenomenon connecting various events due to a lack of linkeages between the events and widely shared commonalities in their character, and that generalised historical concepts such as the 'General Crisis' may be unhelpful in education.

The origin of the concept stems from British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his pair of 1954 articles, "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century", published in Past & Present.^{[citation needed]} Hobsbawm regarded the 17th century as "a necessary phase of economic crisis required by the progress of modernity".

British conservative historian Hugh Trevor-Roper modified Hobsbawm's concept and coined the term 'General Crisis' in a 1959 article titled "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century", published in the same journal. Whereas Hobsbawm had discussed an economic crisis in Europe, Trevor-Roper saw a wider crisis, "a crisis in the relations between society and the State".

Trevor-Roper argued that the middle years of the 17th century in Western Europe saw a widespread breakdown in politics, economics and society caused by a complex series of demographic, religious, economic and political problems. In the "general crisis", various events such as the English Civil War, the Fronde in France, the climax of the Thirty Years' War in the Holy Roman Empire and revolts against the Spanish Crown in Portugal, Naples and Catalonia were all manifestations of the same problem.

The most important cause of the "general crisis", in Trevor-Roper's opinion, was the conflict between "Court" and "Country"; that is between the increasingly powerful centralising, bureaucratic, sovereign princely states represented by the court, and the traditional, regional, land-based aristocracy and gentry representing the country. He saw the intellectual and religious changes introduced by the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation as important secondary causes of the "general crisis".^{[citation needed]} Trevor-Roper argued that the 'violent socio-economic struggles and profound shifts in religious and intellectual values' of the 17th century were caused by the formation of modern nation-states.

Subsequent historians interested in the General Crisis include Geoffrey Parker, who has authored multiple books on the subject.^{[non-primary source needed]} Initially, Parker (1997) broadly followed the concept of Trevor-Roper, but in 2013 he expanded the concept to argue there was a global General Crisis, exacerbated by the global climate change known as the "Little Ice Age".