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Predicting the Past? Integrating Vulnerability, Climate and Culture during Historical Famines

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Grounding Global Climate Change

Abstract

Research on climate change is essentially a study of the past. However, while predicting future developments rests firmly on the analysis of historical changes, cooperation between climatologists and historians is extremely rare. Instead, the field is mired by disciplinary constraints and the resilient dichotomy of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ factors. Integrative approaches are only just beginning to emerge. Fewer still are empirical case studies that test the interaction of climate impacts and human responses in small-scale, high-resolution analyses. This paper tries to provide examples of both, drawing on the field of famine-studies. It presents the vulnerability-approach as an interdisciplinary boundary object for climate research, introducing the global famine of 1770–1772 as a case study. In this way, the paper makes the case for a genuinely historical approach in climate research to replace the current mode of simply ‘predicting the past.’

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Pages2k (past global changes of the last two millennia) is a multinational working group focusing on climate reconstructions. Its papers and official press releases, for example, focus exclusively on reconstructions, refraining from any interpretation of possible societal impacts. Nonetheless, these gaps encourage journalists to take licence and charge these reconstructions with populist narratives. For example, the leading German news site Spiegel Online, featured the paper (PAGES 2k Consortium 2013) with the headline “The fall of civilisations explained” and incorporated sweeping assumptions on the fate of “the Romans” or “the Mayans” (Bojanowski 2013). In another typical move, a “science podcast” (Science Magazine 2012) as well as an article on climate and the “collapse of ancient Maya civilization” (Science Daily 2012) are the result of PR “material provided by the University of Southern California,” to flank a more cautious scientific article on the day of its publication (Kennett et al. 2012). To a certain extent, the same division of labour is present in the separation of working groups I (“the physical science basis”) and II (“impacts, adaptations and vulnerability”) in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC).

  2. 2.

    Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992) used the term “silent referents” to describe narratives that continue to shape our knowledge even when they have slipped from an individual’s power of disposal over time. While he refers to colonial discourse, similar historical narratives of decline and ascent shape our understanding of ‘climate’ and its societal impacts. On the (fragile) historical grounding of modern imaginaries dealing with ‘climate refugees’ see, for example, Lübken (2012).

  3. 3.

    However, the supposed impact of climate on the French Revolution has remained a popular topic (Fagan 2002; Le Roy Ladurie 2006).

  4. 4.

    The crises of the 1770s are at the focus of an interdisciplinary research group on eighteenth century famines, uniting palaeoclimatologists, anthropologists and historians at Heidelberg University: http://www.hce.uni-heidelberg.de/jrg/facingfamine.html.

  5. 5.

    For an account of these conflicts, see, for example, Arand (1773), particularly pp. 143–153, and on the displacement of non-academic physicians during the hygric anomaly, pp. 163–176. A colleague of his used the famine in Bengal to discuss the relation of climate and health for similar ends (see pp. 110–144 in Hecker 1839).

  6. 6.

    Early modern European medicine rested on the concept of bodily fluids. Extreme climates such as hotness, coldness or humidity could throw them off balance and result in disease. Even though proponents of the competing miasma theory regarded contagion as a more important factor, the communicating agents (bacteria and viruses) were not discovered until much later, resulting in futile and often counter-productive treatments.

  7. 7.

    For an overview of the heated discussion that prompted a flood of publications, particularly in hard-hit Saxony, where the church was under particular stress, see Wagner (1773).

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  1. Heidelberg Center for the Environment, Heidelberg University, Grabengasse 3-5, 69117, Heidelberg, Germany

    Dominik Collet

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  1. Institute of Sociology – Faculty of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Hessen, Germany

    Heike Greschke

  2. International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History”, Humboldt University, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Julia Tischler

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Collet, D. (2015). Predicting the Past? Integrating Vulnerability, Climate and Culture during Historical Famines. In: Greschke, H., Tischler, J. (eds) Grounding Global Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9322-3_3

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