"This rich and original integration of price history and the history of climate, vividly written and argued with great verve, deserves the attention of all historians of the Ming, indeed of anyone interested in the ways societies react to crises that threaten their stability and very existence. The breadth and imagination of Timothy Brook's scholarship, with the very stuff of the Ming at its center, make this book a compelling instance of a global history with urgent contemporary resonances." --Craig Clunas, author of Chinese Painting and Its Audiences "Chinese grain prices prove to be a powerful documentary proxy to situate the end-of-Ming crises into the global climate history of the Little Ice Age. Twenty-five years since his The Confusions of Pleasure reoriented Ming China's commerce as the center of global trade, Timothy Brook's The Price of Collapse centers famine grain prices as the best index to explain why the Ming fell when it did. All fall-of-the-Ming narratives must now include climate change and now all global climate historians can draw from China's experience." --Marta E. Hanson, independent scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science "In this deeply researched volume, Timothy Brook delves into the history of prices of ordinary things that affected ordinary lives in Ming China. The result is the clearest and most careful argument yet that the chill and drought of the Little Ice Age overwhelmed the dynasty's capacity to forestall famine and prevent its own political demise.

" --J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University " The Price of Collapse is history at its best: detailed, insightful, multivocal, and marvelously told in a gripping and compelling manner. Timothy Brook eloquently shows how to work closely with sources and analyze local history with a view to global concerns." --Dagmar Schäfer, executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.