Outsiders—some traveling to a possible place of employment or refuge and some wandering as vagabonds with an eye on the main chance—were a constant presence in early modern Europe. But their stories are faint to nonexistent in most of the archival records available to historians. Such records illuminate the lives of the permanent, rooted, populations but rarely reveal much about those who stood outside the local communities through which they passed on their journeys. Analysis of a large, unusual data set compiled in the small Dutch city of Franeker in the mid-seventeenth century, however, uncovers the circumstances and motives of poor travelers and indigent wayfarers who passed through the city, providing a glimpse into the lives of a population otherwise largely hidden.

Historians’ engagement with the social sciences, which was promising and multi-dimensional into the 1970s, shriveled soon thereafter. The factors that seemed to justify this turning away appear today to be much less compelling. Times have changed, and both historians and social scientists may now be ready to re-engage with an interrupted project to intensify interdisciplinary dialogue, improve the methods of historical explanation, and construct a more historical body of social theory.

Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century is the fullest statement of the seventeenth-century crisis to date; it is an epic history with an enormous cast. But the people and institutions that it covers must share the historical stage with another agent of change—the Little Ice Age, which functions as the glue that holds together the era's myriad of events, producing an agricultural, political, and military crisis of global proportions. What is missing in Parker's account is a credible explanation for his version of the “great divergence”—the fact that resolution of the crisis took a different and fateful form in one region of Eurasia but in none of the others. Parker's claims about the Little Ice Age are ultimately testable, but his claim that it laid the basis for the “great divergence” remains mysterious.

Since its introduction more than fifty years ago, the concept of a general seventeenth-century crisis has met with skepticism from most historians of Europe. Yet this historiographical latecomer persists as a seemingly necessary feature of early modern periodization. The economic contraction of the era is broadly accepted, but the crisis concept makes a larger claim—that the economic reversals led, ultimately, to a regrouping, a transformation of basic patterns and possibilities of European economic life. The challenge has always been to find a common thread—a credible theory—capable of tying together the disparate events of the time. The theoretical apparatus of fifty years ago may no longer serve, but more recent research offers possibilities for a rehabilitation of the concept of economic crisis.