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210 PERIOD 2 • The Early Modern World, 1450–1750

search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to
death in their beds.” 6
The situation was similar in Dutch and British territories of North America.
A Dutch observer in New Netherland (later New York) reported in 1656 that
he had been told by local people that disease had “melted down” their numbers
7
by 90 percent since the coming of the Europeans. To Governor Bradford of
Plymouth colony (in present-day Massachusetts), such conditions represented the
“good hand of God” at work, “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives . . .
8
that he might make room for us.” Not until the late seventeenth century did native
numbers begin to recuperate somewhat from this catastrophe, and even then, not
everywhere.
®
AP EXAM TIP As the Great Dying took hold in the Americas, it interacted with another
You need to natural phenomenon, this time one of genuinely global proportions. Known as
understand the effects the Little Ice Age, it was a period from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries of
of environmental events unusually cool temperatures that spanned much of the early modern period, most
on human history.
prominently in the Northern Hemisphere. Its causes were complex and multifac-
eted. Several natural processes contributed to global cooling, including a low point
in sunspot activity, slight changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, and an unusu-
ally large number of volcanic eruptions in the tropics whose ash and gases blocked
the sun’s warming energy. But human actions also contributed to climate change.
As many millions died, large areas of Native American farmland were deserted and
the traditional practice of using burning to manage forests also stopped in many
regions. These changes sparked a resurgence of plant life, which in turn took large
amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere, contributing
to global cooling. These factors combined with natural medium- and short-term
climate fluctuations to bring shorter growing seasons and less hospitable weather
conditions that adversely affected food production across the globe.
®
AP While the onset, duration, and effects of the Little Ice Age varied from region
CAUSATION to region, the impact of a cooler climate reached its peak in many areas in the mid-
How did climate seventeenth century, helping to spark what scholars term the General Crisis. Much
fluctuations disrupt of China, Europe, and North America experienced record or near-record cold
social and political winters during this period. Regions near the equator in the tropics and Southern
stability in seventeenth-
century world history? Hemisphere also experienced extreme conditions and irregular rainfall, result-
ing, for instance, in the growth of the Sahara Desert. Wet, cold summers reduced
harvests dramatically in Europe, while severe droughts ruined crops in many other
regions, especially China, which suffered terrible drought between 1637 and 1641.
Difficult weather conditions accentuated other stresses in societies, leading to wide-
spread famines, epidemics, uprisings, and wars in which millions perished. Eurasia
did not escape lightly from these stresses: the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China,
nearly constant warfare in Europe, and civil war in Mughal India all occurred in
the context of the General Crisis, which only fully subsided when more favorable
weather patterns took hold starting in the eighteenth century.
Nor were the Americas, already devastated by the Great Dying, spared the suffering
that accompanied the Little Ice Age and the General Crisis of the seventeenth century.
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample.
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