The 17th Century Little Ice Age wreaked havoc on weather systems and economies around the world. In China, extreme cold and intense droughts led to soaring grain prices, and as food security collapsed, so did the centuries old political regime of the Ming dynasty.

Alasdair speaks to Tim Brook about his groundbreaking book ‘The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China’. They discuss the importance of climate changes in the rise and fall of empires, and the lessons that can be learned from climate-induced famines in dynastic China. 

Dr Book is a Canadian historian and an Emeritus Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He held the Republic of China Chair at UBC’s Centre for Chinese Research until his retirement in 2022. 

Further reading:

• ‘What is climate-flation?’, Land and Climate Review, March 2026
• The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China by Timothy Brook, 2023
• The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 by Dagomar Degroot, 2018
• ‘Climate change and society in the 15th to 18th centuries’, WIREs Climate Change, March 2018
• ‘Nine sloughs: profiling the climate history of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, 1260-1644’, Journal of Chinese History, November 2016 
• The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties by Timothy Brook, 2013

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