Geoffrey Parker, Distinguished University Professor and Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History, is the author of a new book, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale Press, 2013).

“A powerful and engrossing study.”—The Sunday Times

The books is divided into five parts, with the first using first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s; the second travels across Eurasia to chart the scale and impact of those events; the third looks at the areas that emerged relatively unscathed; the fourth gathers the human stories. The fifth gives the tale of the survivor and the aftermath of a period of unprecedented upheaval that may have cost the lives of more than a third of people throughout the world.

“A magisterial book.”—Financial Times

Winner of the 2012 Heineken Prize for History, Parker is a British historian specializing in Spanish and military history of the early modern era. He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Spanish-American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cadiz), and the Royal Academy of History (Madrid).

Parker’s many books include The Grand Strategy of Philip II, (Yale, 1998), winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize, and The Military Revolution, winner of the best book prize of the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology, as well as seminal works on global military history and early modern Europe.