ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the debates on both a global and regional scale, with an evidential focus on the Indian subcontinent. It seeks to address the notion of the seventeenth-century crisis on the subcontinent, considering historiographic and scientific evidence as well as writings on famine and famine causality on eighteenth-century India, in the context of wider discussions in global environmental and climate history. The chapter argues that the idea of a climate-induced seventeenth-century crisis for India requires more detailed mining of documentary and paleo sources – both in terms of time and space – for comparative and quantitative evidence. It discusses famines in eighteenth-century India, the study of which – through contemporary and near contemporary reports – is disruptive of simplistic, climate-led causalities, often assumed in the work of Geoffrey Parker and other historians looking to establish links between anomalous climatic conditions and societal upheaval.
