The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720.
One of the ten best history books of 2018, according to the Financial Times.
Winner of the 2018 Atmospheric Science Librarians International (ASLI) Choice award for best history book related to atmospheric science.
Recipient of a featured review in The American Historical Review, and an H-Environment Roundtable Review.
Winner of the 2018 Atmospheric Science Librarians International (ASLI) Choice award for best history book related to atmospheric science.
Recipient of a featured review in The American Historical Review, and an H-Environment Roundtable Review.
Beginning in the thirteenth century, natural forces started cooling the climate of the Northern Hemisphere. The “Little Ice Age” that followed would reach its chilliest point in the seventeenth century, when, according to many scholars, it destabilized societies around the world by ruining harvests and contributing to outbreaks of epidemic disease. The Frigid Golden Age is the first book devoted to explaining how a society thrived in the Little Ice Age. It argues that the precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age helped it prosper as other societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation.
The book pioneers a step-by-step method for connecting climate change to human history. First, it links gradual, global trends in temperature and circulation to changes in the frequency, variability, and intensity of weather in specific regions, such as the North Sea or the Svalbard archipelago. Second, it connects these regional weather events to specific human activities, from a naval battle to the creation of a new painting. Finally, third, it uses many of these local connections to trace broader relationships between climatic and human trends on the biggest scales in time and space. Unlike most other environmental histories of the Little Ice Age, it isolates the influence of climate change on human history by following all of these relationships not only in periods of acute climatic cooling, but also in the warmer decades that separated them.
The Frigid Golden Age reveals that regional climate changes provoked local or regional weather that shortened but occasionally imperiled Dutch journeys to Asia; set the stage for the growth of lucrative industries in the Arctic; enriched merchants stockpiling grain; and encouraged innovations in domestic travel. Frigid winters permitted invasions of the Republic across frozen rivers but also weakened armies besieging Dutch cities, while new patterns of atmospheric circulation gave crucial advantages to Dutch fleets fighting English and French rivals at sea. Dutch artists depicted Little Ice Age weather and wrestled with its consequences, while entrepreneurs and inventors introduced technologies that mitigated or exploited its impacts on local environments.
These histories reveal, above all, that early modern farmers, soldiers, merchants, artists, and politicians often responded constructively, creatively, and even proactively to climate change. They were not the hapless victims that climate historians have often portrayed them to be. Their triumphs and failures have much to tell us today, as we struggle to adapt to a warming world.
For reviews, interviews, related articles, and purchasing information, visit the book's website.
The book pioneers a step-by-step method for connecting climate change to human history. First, it links gradual, global trends in temperature and circulation to changes in the frequency, variability, and intensity of weather in specific regions, such as the North Sea or the Svalbard archipelago. Second, it connects these regional weather events to specific human activities, from a naval battle to the creation of a new painting. Finally, third, it uses many of these local connections to trace broader relationships between climatic and human trends on the biggest scales in time and space. Unlike most other environmental histories of the Little Ice Age, it isolates the influence of climate change on human history by following all of these relationships not only in periods of acute climatic cooling, but also in the warmer decades that separated them.
The Frigid Golden Age reveals that regional climate changes provoked local or regional weather that shortened but occasionally imperiled Dutch journeys to Asia; set the stage for the growth of lucrative industries in the Arctic; enriched merchants stockpiling grain; and encouraged innovations in domestic travel. Frigid winters permitted invasions of the Republic across frozen rivers but also weakened armies besieging Dutch cities, while new patterns of atmospheric circulation gave crucial advantages to Dutch fleets fighting English and French rivals at sea. Dutch artists depicted Little Ice Age weather and wrestled with its consequences, while entrepreneurs and inventors introduced technologies that mitigated or exploited its impacts on local environments.
These histories reveal, above all, that early modern farmers, soldiers, merchants, artists, and politicians often responded constructively, creatively, and even proactively to climate change. They were not the hapless victims that climate historians have often portrayed them to be. Their triumphs and failures have much to tell us today, as we struggle to adapt to a warming world.
For reviews, interviews, related articles, and purchasing information, visit the book's website.
Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Humanity in the Solar System
Under Contract with Harvard University Press / Viking / Donga M&B
Self-landing, reusable rockets; inflatable spacecraft; fuel-free propulsion; even miniaturized “cube” satellites. Breakthroughs pioneered by new corporations and old space agencies alike have led to technologies once consigned to speculative science fiction. Together, all promise to sharply cut the cost of reaching deep space, in ways that may at last enable the human settlement of the final frontier. A new era in the history of humanity’s engagement with outer space seems to be dawning.
It may therefore appear like outer space environments are, for the first time, poised to play a major role in human history, after millennia of being little more than passive, immutable settings for the human story. Yet sudden and profound environmental changes across the solar system have long influenced cultures, altered economies, and provoked political upheaval on Earth. Recently, scientists, engineers, and military officers have even started to transform environments in outer space, and plans for more profound transformations are leaving the drawing board. The solar system has therefore been a dynamic actor in centuries of human history, shaping and increasingly shaped by ideas and institutions in societies the world over.
This is a story that has never been comprehensively told. Most historians assume that people have been entirely responsible for the human past. Even environmental historians, who investigate how nature and people have influenced one another through time, have focused only on terrestrial environments. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean will be among the first environmental history books to consider deep connections between cosmic and human histories. It promises not only to transform how historians understand the human past and the forces that helped shape it, but also how scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and space enthusiasts make sense of humanity’s expansion into the solar system.
Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean focuses on the cosmic environments that have had the greatest impact on human history: those of the Sun, Venus, the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter. In chapters that deal with each of these places, the book moves from the center of the solar system (the Sun) to its icy periphery. Along the way, it offers a four-century-long history of strange interactions between human and nonhuman actors across wildly different scales in time and place.
It may therefore appear like outer space environments are, for the first time, poised to play a major role in human history, after millennia of being little more than passive, immutable settings for the human story. Yet sudden and profound environmental changes across the solar system have long influenced cultures, altered economies, and provoked political upheaval on Earth. Recently, scientists, engineers, and military officers have even started to transform environments in outer space, and plans for more profound transformations are leaving the drawing board. The solar system has therefore been a dynamic actor in centuries of human history, shaping and increasingly shaped by ideas and institutions in societies the world over.
This is a story that has never been comprehensively told. Most historians assume that people have been entirely responsible for the human past. Even environmental historians, who investigate how nature and people have influenced one another through time, have focused only on terrestrial environments. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean will be among the first environmental history books to consider deep connections between cosmic and human histories. It promises not only to transform how historians understand the human past and the forces that helped shape it, but also how scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and space enthusiasts make sense of humanity’s expansion into the solar system.
Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean focuses on the cosmic environments that have had the greatest impact on human history: those of the Sun, Venus, the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter. In chapters that deal with each of these places, the book moves from the center of the solar system (the Sun) to its icy periphery. Along the way, it offers a four-century-long history of strange interactions between human and nonhuman actors across wildly different scales in time and place.
The Oxford Handbook of Resilience in Climate History
Lead editor, with J. R. McNeill and Amy Hessl. Under Contract with Oxford University Press
Earth has warmed by over one degree Celsius since the pre-industrial period, and model simulations suggest that, under present emissions trends, it will warm by perhaps three degrees Celsius by the end of the twenty-first century. The combination of the speed, eventual magnitude, and human origin of present-day warming has no parallel in Earth’s history. Yet in the 300,000-year history of humanity, natural causes or “forcings” – including slight changes in Earth’s orbit, modest fluctuations in solar output, and volcanic eruptions – have abruptly and profoundly changed both global and regional climates.
For over a century, scholars have argued that these natural climate changes shortened or interrupted growing seasons and thereby caused or intensified harvest failures in many societies. The "History of Climate and Society" (HCS) - the interdisciplinary field that identifies human responses to past climate change - has been dominated by studies that use statistical or qualitative methods to link these harvest failures to food shortages, famines, outbreaks of epidemic disease, and conflict within or between societies. Many of the most influential HCS publications conclude that severe or sustained periods of cooling and drought caused some of history’s best-known civilizations to “collapse” – to rapidly lose political organization, socioeconomic complexity, and ultimately population.
Climate histories now inform many dire predictions for humanity’s future, including the common assumption that present-day civilizations would disintegrate if global heating exceeds dangerous thresholds. Yet in recent decades, HCS scholars have increasingly explored the resilience of past communities and societies to climate changes and anomalies. In over 30 chapters, written by authors in many disciplines and in six continents, this handbook will reveal how populations have been resilient in the face of climate changes from the Last Glacial Maximum (the last "ice age," in popular parlance) to the present period of extreme warming. Its aim is not only to revise how scholars understand the past, but also to discern common pathways by which populations endured climate change: pathways that may inform present-day policymaking and activism.
For over a century, scholars have argued that these natural climate changes shortened or interrupted growing seasons and thereby caused or intensified harvest failures in many societies. The "History of Climate and Society" (HCS) - the interdisciplinary field that identifies human responses to past climate change - has been dominated by studies that use statistical or qualitative methods to link these harvest failures to food shortages, famines, outbreaks of epidemic disease, and conflict within or between societies. Many of the most influential HCS publications conclude that severe or sustained periods of cooling and drought caused some of history’s best-known civilizations to “collapse” – to rapidly lose political organization, socioeconomic complexity, and ultimately population.
Climate histories now inform many dire predictions for humanity’s future, including the common assumption that present-day civilizations would disintegrate if global heating exceeds dangerous thresholds. Yet in recent decades, HCS scholars have increasingly explored the resilience of past communities and societies to climate changes and anomalies. In over 30 chapters, written by authors in many disciplines and in six continents, this handbook will reveal how populations have been resilient in the face of climate changes from the Last Glacial Maximum (the last "ice age," in popular parlance) to the present period of extreme warming. Its aim is not only to revise how scholars understand the past, but also to discern common pathways by which populations endured climate change: pathways that may inform present-day policymaking and activism.