The emperor toppled by the price revolution

Fernand Braudel suggested that to write a complete history of the world of early modernity, the priority task is to develop "an assessment of the limits of what was possible". This is what we set out to do in our latest lecture, "The Emperor Overthrown by the Price Revolution". As it happens, the best food price series available under the Ming period concern the phases of grain price rises during famines. Hundreds of prices, expressed either in silver or copper coinage, are reported in the sections of local monographs devoted to natural disasters. Taken together, they show that famine prices remained relatively constant at first, but began to rise in the 1580s and even more dramatically in the 1630s. It would be conceivable to invoke the "price revolution" of the Chongzhen reign (1628-1644) in support of the hypothesis that the massive importation of silver from the New World was the cause of an equally massive inflation; we prefer, for our part, to consider that this shift in prices was the consequence of environmental factors playing within the Chinese economy itself, notably a drop in average temperatures from 1629 and a prolonged drought from 1637. With the price levels reached in these years, it's hard to imagine how the last Ming emperor could have remained on the throne, and how the dynasty could have survived.