The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

Social scientists develop knowledge that is directly pertinent to global challenges and crises and need to be included in initiatives taken to address them. This book is a step towards such presentation and involvement. Global crises are crucially intertwined with our relationships, groups, organizations, communities, institutions, how they collaborate with each other, how they compete with each other, and the dynamics intermingled with these. These dimensions are inadequately addressed by scientists and insufficiently recognized by other stakeholders. With contributions from a global array of respected social scientists, this shortform book contributes to deep understandings of social phenomena associated with global crises. In illuminating interventions via those dealing with challenges and crises first-hand, the book also shows the ongoing personal development required to address global crises in productive ways. This book will be of interest to social scientists, researchers, academics, organizational consultants and students in the fields of management, especially those focusing on global challenges and crises. It will also be a useful resource for practitioners and policy makers.

Understanding Global Crises is an innovative and interdisciplinary text that investigates the key contemporary economic, social, and environmental crises and demonstrates their deep interconnection. Contributing to the discussion of large-scale crises, this book provides a conceptual framework to understand the current global landscape. Essential cascading crises topics, such as economic collapse, climate change, racial injustice, domestic violence, and epistemic oppression, are explored in order to equip readers with the clarity to understand global crises, assess policy interventions, and analyze social responses. To achieve future resilience, the book shows that society must recognize various forms of inequality and make policy changes. Each chapter showcases an international case study, covering real-life examples of topics such as climate disinformation, vaccine distribution disparities, environmental racism, and socioeconomic deprivation. Other features of the book include key terms, suggested further reading, and discussion questions, as well as online supplements comprising PowerPoint slides and an instructor’s guide. Understanding Global Crises will be a valuable text to support courses in economics, environmental studies, political science, public health, and social policy.

This groundbreaking collection on global leadership features innovative and critical perspectives by scholars from international relations, political economy, medicine, law and philosophy, from North and South. The book's novel theorization of global leadership is situated historically within the classics of modern political theory and sociology, relating it to the crisis of global capitalism today. Contributors reflect on the multiple political, economic, social, ecological and ethical crises that constitute our current global predicament. The book suggests that there is an overarching condition of global organic crisis, which shapes the political and organizational responses of the dominant global leadership and of various subaltern forces. Contributors argue that to meaningfully address the challenges of the global crisis will require far more effective, inclusive and legitimate forms of global leadership and global governance than have characterized the neoliberal era.

We are facing a global energy crisis caused by world population growth, an escalating increase in demand, and continued dependence on fossil-based fuels for generation. It is widely accepted that increases in greenhouse gas concentration levels, if not reversed, will result in major changes to world climate with consequential effects on our society and economy. This is just the kind of intractable problem that Purdue University's Global Policy Research Institute seeks to address in the Purdue Studies in Public Policy series by promoting the engagement between policy makers and experts in fields such as engineering and technology. Major steps forward in the development and use of technology are required. In order to achieve solutions of the required scale and magnitude within a limited timeline, it is essential that engineers be not only technologically-adept but also aware of the wider social and political issues that policy-makers face. Likewise, it is also imperative that policy makers liaise closely with the academic community in order to realize advances. This book is designed to bridge the gap between these two groups, with a particular emphasis on educating the socially-conscious engineers and technologists of the future. In this accessibly-written volume, central issues in global energy are discussed through interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from both North America and Europe. The first section provides an overview of the nature of the global energy crisis approached from historical, political, and sociocultural perspectives. In the second section, expert contributors outline the technology and policy issues facing the development of major conventional and renewable energy sources. The third and final section explores policy and technology challenges and opportunities in the distribution and consumption of energy, in sectors such as transportation and the built environment. The book's epilogue suggests some future scenarios in energy distribution and use.

Incorporating a broad range of economic approaches, Understanding Financial Crises explores the merits of various arguments and theories which have been used to explain the causes of financial crises. The book explores eight of these different explanations: underconsumption, debt accumulation, financialization, income inequality, financial fragility, tendency of rate of profit to fall, human behavior, and global imbalances. The introduction provides a brief overview of each argument along with a comparison of their relative merits. Each chapter then introduces one of the arguments, explores a historical case, and focuses on the insights that can be gleaned into the global crisis in 2007–2008. The book draws on insights from various schools of thought including post-Keynesian economics, Marxist economics, behavioral economics, neoclassical economics, and more, to provide a pluralist overview of the causes of economic crises in general and the Great Recession in particular. This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on economic and financial crises, political economy and heterodox economics. It is well suited to academicians, practitioners, and financial analysts working within the relevant fields.

A historical and theoretical investigation of the “common storylines” of recent financial crises. Financial crises have some common storylines, among them bursting asset bubbles, bank failures, sharp tightening of credit, and downturn in trade. They are also different from one another. Some start with sudden reversal of international capital flows, others with domestic credit implosions. A challenge to economic research is to integrate common as well as disparate threads into a coherent analytical framework that is at the same time empirically testable. In Understanding Global Crises, Assaf Razin offers a review of an emerging paradigm that is consistent with the key features of recent global financial crises. This paradigm presents in a transparent way basic analytical elements of the theories of financial and monetary crises and how these elements fit together in macroeconomic analysis of global crises. Razin surveys the credit implosion that led to a severe banking crisis in Japan in the 1990s, the Asian financial crisis that began in 1997, the global meltdown of 2008, and the Euro-zone crisis. He reviews the analytics of financial fragilities, credit frictions, currency crises, and balance of payments crises, and addresses international capital flows with information frictions. He then presents key developments in the New Keynesian analytical framework by examining the surge of re-modeling efforts aimed at the development of an analytical framework to underpin monetary and fiscal policy in the post-2008 economic era.