The political, economic, and social upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century are called a ‘General Crisis’, and debated under that rubric, in most countries.1 The exception is Germany. For historians of Germany, the Thirty Years’ War is the central concept for organizing the seventeenth century.2 Conversely, historians of the general crisis have largely ignored Germany.3 This is unsatisfactory on both sides. For the crisis historians it is unacceptable not only because any theory of general crisis must be able to account for Germany, but also because the Thirty Years’ War was the most spectacular disorder of the crisis period. German historians, on the other hand, cannot be satisfied with a purely German account of the Thirty Years’ War that suppresses the wider political and economic context of what was, after all, a ‘European civil war’.4.
