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1 Introduction: The New Climate Zeitgeist

For most of the twentieth century, climate represented the untouchable third rail of professional historiography. Enlightenment thinkers of the colonial period, following Montesquieu, linked climatic zones to racialist tropes, helping to legitimize the subjection of African, Asian, and Pacific peoples. Climatic determinism, with its roots in Hippocratic theory, has thus long been stigmatized as an historical prop to European imperialism and an intellectual embryo of biological race theory. Until recently, to propose climate conditions as an influence on human history was to raise the unwelcome specter of a disgraced ideology.

Climate’s stocks as a historiographic paradigm have risen in the twenty-first century, however. In an era of increasing extreme weather, rising seas, and global food system stress, the necessity of integrating climate and environmental change into the work of history has become increasingly urgent. Crude climatic determinism remains anathema, but historical materialism without environmental awareness now appears vulnerable to a dangerous determinism of another kind: a grand narrative of class, government, empire, and trade whose anthropocentric terms are no less a product of Enlightenment liberal ideology than the current ecological crisis itself.

Across a variety of academic fields, climate and human history are no longer estranged. In the sciences, the once marginal field of historical climatology, pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s by Hubert Lamb, now spawns institutes. Given that standardized data for temperature and rainfall are available in most regions only from the mid-nineteenth century on, historical climatologists have mined a multitude of proxy sources – combining a “natural” archive of ice cores, tree rings, and fossilized pollens with a more conventional human archive of agricultural records, weather diaries, etc. – to fill out the climate record across a broad spatio-temporal range: from a single famine year in, say, seventeenth-century Europe, to the beginnings of sedentary human culture 10,000 years ago, and back through the dim, paleoclimatological eras of human evolution. In each case, the propensity of the world climate system to dramatic short and long-term fluctuations – with corresponding ripple effects across human populations – has been a major and consistent finding.

In traditional fields within the humanities, too, a historicized ecological consciousness has become the new norm. Since the 1970s, environmental history has evolved from a parochial American focus to a key interdisciplinary paradigm in both regional studies and world history. The now-thriving field boasts major journals, a professional society, and – the ultimate test of viability – faculty lines. In an adjacent discipline, a new generation of anthropologists have recognized the untenability of the traditional intradisciplinary divide between physical anthropology – which takes seriously the climatic adaptations of early humans – and cultural anthropologists who are, in Carole Crumley’s words, “suspicious … of the determinisms: racial, environmental, social.” Anthropologists, in tune with the overwhelming majority of professional historians, have long aggressively prosecuted their commitment, on principle, to “denying environment a meaningful role in human history” (Historical Ecology 2–3).

A founding presumption of the new climate historicism is that anthropogenic climate change did not begin sometime in the 1950s or 1980s, but rather with the fossil fuel technologies, colonial resource extraction, and global economic growth associated with the early modern period. The task of climate history for this period (which coincides with the so-called Little Ice Age) is to illuminate how specific instances of human ecological agency – land use, agricultural technology, and food production, the opening of trade routes, urban growth, as well as armed conflict, subsistence, and public health crises – were acculturated and rationalized. To fully comprehend the colonial enterprise post-1500, for example, requires we trace the mutual influences between European states and their annexed global environments to show how the export of North Atlantic biota and agricultural, mining, and manufacturing infrastructures within the intercontinental trading network facilitated western contact with (and imprint upon) “exotic” climates and ecosystems, not just peoples.

The new climate history is thus, by its nature, interdisciplinary, requiring a crossing (or leap) into the biophysical sciences and a technical literacy in one or more of the disciplines of climatology, geology, geography, and the biological and environmental sciences. As will be seen by the cluster of groundbreaking recent titles in climate history discussed here, the historiographic potentials are impressive. Humanists by training and sensibility, climate historians are able to explain, in ways physical scientists are not, what the hard data of historical climatology meant in the minds and lived experiences of the people who endured or benefited from a specific meteorological regime, and how societies have adapted to and shaped environmental change. Such climate-aware historicism involves the study of extreme weather and environmental change as objects of knowledge and desire analyzed through “thick” description of specific episodes of socio-ecological stress, such as the droughts, floods, famines, and plagues of the Little Ice Age. The goal of this new eco-critical approach is to reconstruct the rationalizations of historical actors in their relation to specific ecosystems and climate regimes, while tracing the ways various providential, instrumentalist, and proto-ecological views of the world and its natural resources first gained currency and found expression. Vitally important – and this is the true revolution behind the new climate paradigm – are critical histories of socio-cultural responses to “exogenous” natural phenomena beyond human control: for instance, the extreme weather events, natural disasters, and flow-on social convulsions of the middle centuries of the last millennium. Despite major research advances, however, the new climate history paradigm remains highly contested. As we shall see, the marriage of climate science and academic historiography never did run smoothly.

2 Anthropocentrism: The Last Ideology

In 2014, the editors of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JIA), a prominent scholarly forum for academic historians, devoted its winter issue to the Little Ice Age (LIA), the period roughly from 1300 to 1850, during which much of the globe suffered regular spasms of extreme weather characterized by well-below-average temperatures and erratic rainfall. The establishment of the LIA over the last 50 years as an informal but consequential period in late Holocene climate has been made possible through the cross-feeding of relevant historical sources with proxy temperature and rainfall data – from tree rings, sedimented pollens, speleothems, etc. – accumulated by dozens of researchers across multiple fields. These data collectively attest to the widespread impacts of extended cold, drought, and flooding on human communities across Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the centuries after 1300, with links both direct and indirect to devastating disease outbreaks and civil unrest. As such, the LIA represents an exciting frontier of interdisciplinary, and potentially collaborative, research among historians and Earth scientists.

Given the established consensus surrounding LIA data, and the rich research opportunities on offer, it comes as a surprise to recall that the lead article in the 2014 JIA special issue contested the very existence of the LIA. “We find no statistical evidence of any major breaks, trends, or cycles in European weather of the sort that one could associate with an LIA,” averred its authors, Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda. The claim was startling, cavalier, and readily falsifiable. To make their “case,” the authors, both well-known economic historians, deployed forms of statistical obfuscation, straw man argument, and data cherry-picking readily recognizable from far less reputable forums than the JIH – specifically the relentless stygian content stream of climate disinformation sponsored by industry in the decades since global warming first emerged as a political threat to fossil fuel capital investment in the late 1980s. In the measured words of climate historian Sam White, who was offered the opportunity to rebut the Kelly/Ó Gráda article in the same issue, the authors’ argument for a phantom LIA had “serious flaws,” not least their presumption, as non-specialists, that putative flaws in the interpretation of weather data had “somehow evaded hundreds of climate scientists” working for decades in the field (327, 334). The article, White concluded (with a detectable note of exasperation), “is a peculiar – and entirely unfounded – criticism of robust and widely accepted climate science” (351).

A chief peculiarity surrounding the 2014 publication of the Kelly/Ó Gráda article is that the debate it pretended to join – and to which the JIA editors lent their assistance in staging – did not exist. The fact of the LIA was and is uncontested by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and historians. A further historical irony is that the contrarian article’s appearance was swamped in the early 2010s by a near-tsunami of new historical scholarship on the LIA that has definitively established the 1300–1850 period of climate deterioration, and climate historiography itself, in the mainstream of professional historical practice (though it continues to receive a “cold welcome” from significant quarters of the academic establishment, for reasons adduced below).

My selective bibliography of recent LIA scholarship for discussion here comprises six widely reviewed books published in the years immediately before and after the controversial 2014 issue of the JIA: Sam White’s The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (2011) and A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (2017); Geoffrey Parker’s monumental Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013); Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (2014); Bruce Campbell’s The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (2016); as well as significant chapters on the LIA in John L. Brooke’s ground-breaking “big history,” Climate Change and the Course of Global History (2014).

Before I engage with these books’ collective description of the LIA and their consequences for late medieval/early modern historiography, it will be worthwhile to assess more largely what the contrived LIA “debate” in the JIH reveals about the longstanding distrust of academic historians toward climate science and the new climate-historical paradigm. My purpose is not to relitigate the case so easily debunked by White in 2014, but to draw lessons regarding an intellectual culture that recently offered a prestigious platform to discredited tropes and methods of climate denial.

In The Great Transition, Bruce Campbell identifies anthropocentrism as the critical impediment to a fully descriptive historiography of social change: “the long dominance of anthropocentric analyses grounded in either Marxist theory or neoclassical economics means that scant attention has as yet been paid to the historical roles of environmental processes and forces” (27). The complex, LIA-driven socio-ecological transformations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he argues by way of example, “stubbornly refuse to fit comfortably within explanations that give causal primacy to mostly territorially specific human processes and relationships” (395). To properly account for the sweeping social crises of the LIA in Europe requires instead a “holistic approach” that “breaches conventional historical boundaries of time and place” and, most importantly, contests the anthropocentric privileging of human agency to the exclusion of all environmental drivers (396).

According to Campbell, the persistent error in traditional historiography has been “to create a binary divide between human and environmental agencies,” where the natural world functions as a mere backdrop to the ever-fascinating drama of human self-determination. Traditional historiographic practice, both liberal and Marxist, “label[s] human actions as ‘endogenous’, and therefore to be understood and explained, and environmental variables as ‘exogenous’, and consequently less worthy of examination” (396). Under the long-prevailing anthropocentrist regime, the understanding of natural systems and their embedded relation to human affairs has not been a goal, or even a working concept in mainstream historiography. Even the post-1970s emergence of environmental history did not produce a revolution in methodology or disciplinary realignment commensurate with our twenty-first-century cluster of mounting ecological crises or the biophysical research data tools that have emerged to track them.

Deconstruction of this suffocating binary logic is thus first-order work for the new climate historian, but represents an enormous challenge. A key problem lies in re-orienting research in the fields of modern history conspicuously endowed with rich archives and socio-economic data, where the opportunities for human-centered analysis are more or less inexhaustible and continue to be professionally rewarded. “The trouble has arisen,” as White expresses it, “from integrating the role of climate into the current historiography wherever an abundance of evidence has already provided adequate social, economic, and political interpretations of events.” Call it the climate/history paradox: how it is that decades of brilliant and highly satisfying scholarship in modern social and political history have nevertheless “left us without clear and well-documented examples of how and why climate events could shift the course of human history” (Climate of Rebellion 13–14).

White readily acknowledges, moreover, that the climate history paradigm has not been well served by its popular, journalistic iterations, whose research “has often been uneven and the authors … far too ready to reach hasty and dramatic conclusions.”Footnote 1 Climate history, in the popular marketplace, has too often overcorrected for the anthropocentric bias of professional historiography by “fail[ing] to consider social or political context or make adequate room for human agency.” For this and other reasons, the climate paradigm has met with entrenched “skepticism from academic historians” with the result that, at his time of writing in 2011, White might reasonably complain that “climate has yet to play a major role in the mainstream historiography of most regions” (13). Even as biophysical and demographic data pointing to the severity of the LIA accumulated through the 1970s and 1980s, the information remained largely inert – ignored by academic historians who resisted integrating climatic contexts into their working paradigms of historical change. It’s some measure of the impact of White and his fellow new climate historians that his 2011 statement is somewhat less demonstrably true now. The new climate history of the past decade has earned newfound respectability for the field “by bringing climate into human history in a more nuanced way, neither simplifying its role nor neglecting its impact” (14).

The 2010s cohort of new climate historians, sensitive to the age-old charge of environmental determinism, have consciously adopted a vocabulary indebted to ecology – with its focus on complexity, contingency, and chaotic interaction – in place of simplistic frameworks of cause and effect. Bruce Campbell has eloquently framed the guiding principle of the new LIA scholarship:

To do justice to a complex past and the dynamism of the natural world in which people lived, worked and reproduced it is necessary to understand how climate and society, ecology and biology, microbes and humans, acting separately and in combination with each other, shaped the course of history … As [the Great Transition] unfolded, interactions and feedbacks, both environmental and human, occurred at a range of nested temporal and spatial scales – from the short-term to the long-term and the micro to the macro – as change cascaded through the prevailing socio-ecological system … (396)

A key paradigm shift in this eco-historical approach is elasticity of scale, in both time and place. To comprehend the evolution and impact of the Black Death – to take Campbell’s central example – requires the subtle imbrication of microbial, human, trans-national, and atmospheric scales, of local and global impacts, and a working conception of trans-human, biological time and space. The sudden penetration of bubonic Y. pestis, via multiple vectors, into human communities in Asia in the mid-fourteenth century exemplifies the historical unfolding of the Great Transition at large, characterized by “a cascading process of contingent chaotic development … [where] each stage of each component in the transition was unique, with outcomes that were rarely predetermined and always prone to unpredictability” (396). A feature of this process is its nonlinear evolution. An inconspicuous bacterium makes the leap to a rodent host. Soon millions are dead and human societies are transformed. The lesson of the Black Death is that historical agents not only reside at different spatio-temporal scales, but transgress and transcend them, with the potential for metastasizing impacts at each phase.

The development of new environmental histories that transcend anthropocentrist traditions requires that scholars abandon a reflexive indifference toward the biophysical sciences, allowing for perception of the full currents of social change in periods of climate and environmental stress. For the climate historian, the challenge is to deftly manage the necessary analytic vocabularies for each spatio-temporal level, as well as the “cascading” interactions between them. The fact that acquisition of these technical vocabularies requires immersion in multiple scientific fields sets a high threshold for effective climate history, and helps explain why adoption of the paradigm has been slow.

But other disincentives are at work, too. The example of Kelly/Ó Gráda, who simply ignored climate science and the paleoclimate literature in their critique of the LIA, suggests that the age-old “two cultures” problem, putting the sciences and social sciences and humanities at odds, dies hard, even under the existential pressure of a global climate change emergency. The Earth system sciences, dedicated to descriptions of the biophysical world, have traditionally been irrelevant to anthropocentrist historiography, inflected by neoclassical economics, Marxist theory, or other human-centered approaches. The fact that so-called science studies – dedicated to the critique of scientific methods and institutional histories – itself became a popular field of humanistic inquiry in the late twentieth century points to an ingrained suspicion of the biophysical sciences, of which Kelly/Ó Gráda is a piquant latter-day example.

The methodological burden for the new climate history is thus a heavy one. Its successful practice requires not only the historian’s self-education about the natural world and its processes, but also a critical awareness of the anthropocentric biases that have inhibited integration of that knowledge in the past and that continue to govern much research in the discipline. Scholars have been habituated to articulating human history and cultural evolution as a legible story of progress or decline governed by human-built institutions and enacted by moral agents, with the natural world relegated to scenic backdrop. Social history in the new climate paradigm, by contrast, is ecological in character. It operates on the assumption that human affairs exhibit the same patterns of systems connectivity, complexity, and nonlinear transformation that we observe in the organic world, from the genetic profiles of bacterial disease to continental weather systems.

To be clear, the research sciences have not always offered a progressive, importable paradigm for the humanities. For most of the twentieth century, across many fields, scientific practice was reductionist in approach, with the goal of isolating natural organisms and their observed behaviors within ever smaller ambits. But the advent at the turn of the twenty-first century of large-scale digital technologies and data-merging capability – from genome sequencing, to climate modeling, to satellite imaging of land and sea – has enabled scientists to emerge from discrete disciplinary problem-solving to address the larger “Earth system” picture, including the tightly coupled, vital relationship between humans and their environments.

Nowhere in the new climate historiography of the 2010s is the implication that modern historical change is innocent of social power inequities and the institutionalized racism that underwrote wholesale exploitation of subaltern populations in the colonial period, only that these crucial human factors are embedded within a larger, and heretofore largely ignored, socio-environmental nexus. The goal of the new climate history, rather, is to demonstrate, over and over, the historical and material interdependence of human and natural systems – something the academic humanities until now have largely failed to do. “The new climate science,” as John L. Brooke argues, “has destroyed the refuge of skeptical historians, who traditionally discount the impact of natural forces because they presumably operated as an unknowable constant. These natural forces are now ‘knowable,’ and they were not ‘constant’” (391).

According to the new scientific paradigm, biocomplexity – the chaotically variable interaction between organic elements on multiple scales – is the defining characteristic of all ecosystems, including human societies. The new climate history – inspired by the science of biocomplexity – tests narrative frameworks for describing the nonlinear interaction of historical actors and events across multiple scales of time and space, from the molecular to the intercontinental, from a single growing season in the mid-1600s to millennia to deep time. Such an approach was inconceivable before about 1990. For historians of the LIA, their entire research agenda has been enabled by the productivity of new methods and tools that revolutionized paleoclimate research over the last half century, most notably the development of physical proxy records for past climates.

3 History by Proxy: The Little Ice Age

In his Prologue to Global Crisis, entitled “Did Someone Say ‘Climate Change’?,” Geoffrey Parker calls the professional history community to account for “denying a link between climate and catastrophe” (xviii). Climate skepticism might have been justified into the 1980s, when radiocarbon dating was in its infancy, the first carbon dioxide readings of ice cores were only just being recorded, general circulation models of the atmosphere were crude, and paleoclimate models rare in the scientific literature. Even pioneering climate historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, writing in the 1960s, could argue only for a “slight, perhaps negligible” influence of climate on history (Times of Feast 119). But with the emergence since the 1990s of a readily available and increasingly comprehensive historical climate archive, the pressure to incorporate this vast wealth of new environmental information into the historical narrative has grown overwhelming (albeit not, as we have seen, irresistible). In the decade-and-a-half prior to the publication of Global Crisis, some 3500 papers with the keywords “ice cores” alone were published, more than the entire paleoclimate bibliography in 1980.

In addition to ice cores drawn from polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers, which record changing levels of air temperature, rainfall, and volcanic anomalies at an annual resolution, Parker nominates three other significant proxies for past climates whose robustness and reach have developed rapidly in the past 30–40 years. Palynology, the study of pollens in lake sediments, reconstructs the state of vegetation at the time the pollens’ deposit, from which temperature, rainfall, and seasonality can be deduced. While palynology is a recent science, the potential of tree-ring growth as a proxy climate record has been appreciated for a century and more, and now boasts a wide-ranging global database. The science of dendrochronology is, of course, limited to the lifetime of a given tree, which cannot extend its proxy record, as ice cores may do, to timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. But trees, terrestrial and ubiquitous, are especially informative in reconstructing past spring and summer temperatures, and their period of annual growth. Finally, the study of stalagmites and other cave deposits – collectively called speleothems – provides a further key to past climate conditions. Oxygen isotope variations in the calcite sheath of a speleothem record changes in temperature and rainwater composition over geological timescales. The recent explosion in the speleothem record includes extensive new data on the LIA in Europe, as well as detailed reconstruction of fluctuations in the Asian monsoon over the last half-a-million years.

Collectively, this “natural archive” offers thousands of data points of potential relevance to the historian, which, when combined with the traditional human archive of official chronicles, personal letters and diaries, agricultural records, and instrumental data (inter alia) represents a new historiographic paradigm of formidable explanatory power. The plenitude of combined natural and human sources now available, argues Parker, in reference to the seventeenth-century world crisis in particular, “allow[s] historians to integrate climate change with political, economic and social change with unprecedented precision. Accounts of climatic conditions in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the mid-seventeenth century abound, while millions of measurements of tree-rings, ice-cores, pollen deposits and stalactite formations are available” (xxii). Unsurprisingly, given the novelty of their data and methods, the new climate historians, Parker conspicuous among them, have produced radically original accounts of their historical periods, which together form a comprehensive account of global strife in the LIA and the relentlessly adverse climate conditions that helped precipitate it.

The engagement of these historians with the frontiers of Earth and environmental science extends further to consideration of the physical causes – astral and geological – of the LIA. Debate on this question in the relevant scientific fields continues to be lively, but a working consensus has converged around an upsurge in low-latitude volcanic activity after 1250 combined with natural orbital cycles and erratic fluctuations in solar irradiance evidenced by sunspots (which were themselves the object of fascination among astronomers in the period). As Campbell observes, “sunspot activity had effectively ceased” by the last decade of the thirteenth century, ushering in the so-called Wolf Solar Minimum (198). This combined with the cumulative thermal deficit of a suite of tropical volcanic eruptions – in 1258, 1269, 1276, and 1286 – which spread a reflective aerosol veil around the planet, ensured a sharp downward trend in northern hemisphere and global temperatures beginning in the 1290s, as well as flow-on disruptions to weather patterns and rainfall. A global climate deterioration post-1300 is reflected clearly in the narrowed growth rings of trees in both the Old and New Worlds.

In The Great Transition, Campbell points to the consecutive harvest failures of 1315–1316 and then 1329–1330 in Europe as the first of the many social crises engineered by the climate reversals of the LIA. “Incessant heavy rain” across the continent caused crop failure and resulting famine, which “brought the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the struggling societies to the fore” (258). But this was a mere prelude to the global catastrophe of the mid-fourteenth century when climatic stressors initiated release of bubonic plague into the human community. After a period of average temperatures recorded in the global tree record, 1342–1343 witnessed an “exceptionally strong negative environmental forcing on a global scale [that] coincides almost exactly with the point when in western Asia Y. pestis finally spilled over from sylvatic to commensal rodent populations and then began to spread far and wide with devastating consequences for human populations” (285). Campbell’s emphasis on ecological conditions surrounding the emergence of the plague runs counter to traditional historiographic focus on demographic pressures, with Malthusian arguments linking crop failure, civic instability, and population decline. The evidence from climate proxies insists, by contrast, that “the demographic catastrophe” of the Great Death – which killed up to a third of Europe’s population – “owed more to ecological than to economic circumstances” (319). A further episodic decline in solar irradiance in the mid-fifteenth century – the so-called Spörer Solar Minimum – reinforced the negative socio-ecological spiral triggered by the Black Death “as populations and economic output became locked onto a downward path” (394).

Sam White, in The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, takes up the LIA narrative from the late sixteenth century when rebel armies “defied the imperial government for more than a decade, laying waste to wide stretches of the [Ottoman] empire” (185). Early western historiography of the Ottomans, orientalizing in tendency, focused on the decadence and corruption of sultanate governance to explain the Celali Rebellion of the 1590s, while more recent revisionist scholarship has downplayed altogether the importance of social disorder, preferring to emphasize “the resilience of the empire” (188). Missing from these accounts is the glaring fact that the 1590s witnessed the longest drought in the Eastern Mediterranean in 600 years. The value of the new climate history is nowhere more evident than in such a case, where existing historical paradigms, set alongside newly available climate data, are revealed to be conspicuously inadequate. The core of White’s book is to extend our understanding of the “general crisis” of the mid-seventeenth century eastward, where “the troubles of Ottoman lands prove[d] so extreme and so prolonged, even relative to other victims” (188). Extreme cold froze the Bosphorus in 1621, and the first in a series of ill-fated sultans was deposed the following year. The Ottoman Empire’s dependence on a single annual harvest of wheat and barley – itself dependent on mild temperatures and generous spring rainfall – proved a tragic Achilles’ heel once the LIA tightened its grip.

In his follow-up LIA monograph on the seventeenth century, A Cold Welcome, White shifts focus to the Americas, for which “oxygen isotopes in Greenland ice cores indicate that temperatures throughout the early 1600s remained at their lowest point of the Little Ice Age” (141). The first decade of the seventeenth century coincided with the tentative installment of English settlements at Jamestown on the Virginia coast, which barely survived the extreme weather, and only then at the cost of the majority of settlers’ lives and a brutal struggle between the Europeans and indigenous communities (who suffered continent-wide from the same crop-killing cold and drought). But as White’s broad and original survey of early European forays into the Americas shows, the well-known Jamestown disaster was far from the only instance of a halting colonial enterprise shaped by sharply adverse Little Ice Age conditions:

The first Spanish expeditions into the Southeast, one after another, fell victim to storms, hunger, disease, and freezing winters. The French Huguenot attempts to settle Florida suffered famine and ended with a hurricane. England’s first colony at Roanoke disappeared after drought, hunger, and storms. Spain’s outpost in Florida fared so poorly in its environment that Philip III debated whether it was even worth saving. The Popham colony ended after a single winter of extreme cold in Maine. The Spanish Empire’s expeditions to New Mexico faced icy winters, drought, or both. Several of the first French colonies in Canada and New England were decimated by scurvy during long winters. (290)

In A Cold Welcome, White showcases the capacity of the new climate history to identify patterns that are invisible to traditional historiography with its artificially limited focus on individual nation-state or regional narratives. The beauty of climate, as it were, is that it has no respect for geopolitical or other man-made boundaries, and compels the historian to think instead across latitudes and along isothermic lines, in this case from Canada, to Florida, to New Mexico, to Cahokia, Illinois. What results is a deconstructed form of history, with humanity displaced from its complacent center – the “endogenous” to which all else must be “exogenous.”

Like White’s two volumes, which extend the hemispheric boundaries of LIA studies east and west, Geoffrey Parker’s epic Global Crisis combines a revisionist focus on the “general crisis” in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century with comparative analyses, particularly from East and South Asia. A cluster of a dozen volcanic eruptions along the Pacific Rim between 1638 and 1644 triggered the fitful collapse of the East Asian monsoon and a spike in droughts and floods associated with El Niño through the 1640s and 1650s, “extremes of weather seldom witnessed before and never (so far) since” (112). This trans-hemispheric climate deterioration, a protracted episode of global cooling without parallel in the entire Holocene record (i.e., the last 12,000 years), coincided with “more rebellions and revolutions than any comparable period in world history,” from Catalonia and Naples to England, to the Mughal Empire, to dynastic overthrow in China.Footnote 2 Parker documents, moreover, how climatic and political instability reflected for the ordinary people of these regions in “a sharp deterioration in the overall quality of life,” measured in bread prices, disease outbreaks, the traumas of war, and even height averages (668). Other impacts were long-term, even epochal. The catastrophic outbreak of plague in Italy and Spain after 1649, for example, “set the seal on the decline of the Mediterranean as the heart of the European economy forever” (670). Those who best survived the climate catastrophe – the Dutch and, to a mixed degree, England – assumed economic and political leadership of a reorganized, barely recovering continent.

The “long tail” of climate change impacts on human history is likewise the focus of my 2014 book Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, which extends the new LIA studies into the nineteenth century. The eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 in the then Dutch East Indies was, by multiple measures, the most climatically significant of the Holocene, depressing temperatures and altering storm tracks worldwide for 3 years. From this single, disruptive geo-climatological event, I trace a series of “teleconnected” influences on nineteenth-century history, from the disastrous evolution of epidemic cholera in Bengal, to the institution of narcotic crop production in Yunnan (later the “Golden Triangle”), to the United States’ first economic depression, to the first emergence of the modern welfare state in Western Europe. This study, which builds on pioneering research into the post-Tambora period by John Post in the 1970s, draws equally fully from the human archive of poems, paintings, and diaries as the “natural archive” of ice cores, tree rings, and other climate proxies. What emerges from this case-study approach to the Tambora event – whose extreme climatic impacts lasted only 3 years – is powerful evidence for the long-lasting influence on human affairs of even a limited episode of global climate change.

Published the same year as Tambora, John L. Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global takes the opposite approach on the same assumptions. Instead of building outward from a single climate disaster, he surveys the longue durée of human development through the lens of climate change from our evolutionary origins to the present era of global warming sometimes labeled the Anthropocene. In his chapters on the LIA, Brooke echoes the emergent consensus surrounding a new climate-historical narrative for the late Middle Ages, namely, that “the fundamental forces at work in the fourteenth century crisis were exogenous to the socioeconomic system … the result of severe natural disasters, not the dynamics of the demographic and economic systems.” Taken together, these “exogenous shocks must be seen as foundational to the modern world” (380). One of these foundations was, of course, the transatlantic slave trade, which only “grew to monstrous proportions … when the full drought impacts of the Little Ice Age struck the Sahel” in the mid-seventeenth century (443). In refashioning the heretofore eurocentric paradigm of the “general crisis” via the lens of global climate and the LIA, Brooke, like his fellow new climate historians, expands the map of modern history to a scale commensurate with the twenty-first-century paradigm of the Earth System sciences. Famine in Ireland and the slave trade in West Africa, for example, may now be naturally comprehended with a single frame, no longer segregated by artificial spheres of historiographic interest. Working from this paradigm, Brooke is able to trace teleconnections between events both small and large, local and hemispheric – connections invisible to conventional historiography and its regionalist, anthropocentric biases.

4 Coda: Climate, Deep Time, and the Anthropocene

As might be expected given the all-consuming focus on climate change this century – both in academic research and the popular media – the LIA is not the only new historical paradigm to emerge that relies on climate science methods and metrics for its period framing and narrative priorities. Two others are the “deep time” or “big history” approach exemplified by Brooke’s 2014 book, and the hot debate surrounding the “Anthropocene,” a historical framework defined by scaled human interventions in natural systems, including the carbon and nitrogen cycles, agriculturation of land, and the wholesale engineering of freshwater resources. Exactly when these human interventions reached a tipping point at which a “Human Age” on Planet Earth might be said to have commenced – as recent as the industrial period and Nuclear Age, or as ancient as neolithic deep time? – is not a resolvable question, but the emphasis of the Anthropocene paradigm on the interface between human and natural systems automatically reframes the epistemic principles of historiographic inquiry for our age in ways analogous to recent revisionist scholarship on the Little Ice Age.

Stephen Jay Gould has called the popularization of Deep Time in the aftermath of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833) the most significant cultural revolution since Galileo. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), inspired by Lyell, helped imprint a new, abyssal figure of time on the popular imagination. History was the first emergent discipline to feel the shuddering impact of the new Deep Time paradigm, and professional historians of the late-nineteenth century responded with Darwinian ingenuity. The biblical timescale of 6000 years would be preserved by substituting the creation of the Earth with a refurbished chronology invoking “The Birth of Civilization,” with the Mediterranean as its cradle.

Human history thus retained its essential biblical geography and chronology, in terms of scale, but with the tropes of Genesis replaced by mathematics, writing, cities, and the rule of law as the new narrative of origins (this civilization-based narrative formed the basis of my high school history curriculum as late as the 1980s). Via this secularized origin story, the professional history establishment of the twentieth century combined ingenuity with simple denial to keep at bay the Victorian deep time revolution that continues to define and drive the modern bio-physical sciences. The humanities’ hygienic separation from the natural and physical sciences, of which deep time is the founding, enabling principle, has been rigorously policed across generations.

Of course, no respectable scholar today would champion a triumphalist “History of Western Civilization” model beginning in the Mediterranean 5000 years ago. But with the rise of competing liberal, Marxist, and postcolonial narratives of modernity in the second half of the twentieth century, history’s sacralized timeline has been further radically foreshortened to the period of European global expansion and fossil fuel industrialization since 1500. Where once the period before Sumer and the invention of writing was cast into the oblivion of “pre-history,” now a post-1500 modernity narrative reigns supreme. Twenty-first-century Anglo-American history departments are accordingly populated by specialists and sub-specialists of “modern” European imperialism, globalization, and its aftermath of subaltern rising. The work in this field is often brilliant and revelatory but it belongs, nevertheless, to a larger, suffocating hegemony of ideas – what deep time historian Daniel Smail has called “the sterile presentism that grips the historical community” (On Deep History 9). In short, the intellectually restless Victorians excavated deep time, but academic historiography has managed, in the 150 years since, to reinter it. Modernity – glittering, savage, and sublime – is the privileged subject; what predates it is forever, irredeemably, pre-modern.

Presentism is likewise an objection leveled against the idea of an Anthropocene, the most narrow definition of which focuses on the exponentional growth of human impacts on natural cycles and ecosystems since the 1950s, a period definition popularized by John McNeil as “The Great Acceleration.” But advocates of the Anthropocene have also met with resistance from a more familiar quarter, namely, social historians uncomfortable with the importation of scientific models and methods into the practice of narrative history. I conclude this chapter with a description of a refashioned “two cultures” debate from the early 2010s that coincides with the rash of book-length publications on the LIA featured here, a debate that suggests the LIA might already be in the process of being subsumed within a larger conceptual framework for the understanding of climate and human history.

In late October, 2012, Hurricane Sandy formed in the warm waters of the Carribean, before wheeling north along the Atlantic seaboard as a massive, highly unusual “superstorm” with wind gusts of 90 mph. Climate change set the table for Sandy. Historically high sea surface temperatures intensified the winds and increased rainfall by 35%, while 6 in. of sea level rise over the last century meant Sandy’s destructive surge rode in at greater loft, enough to flood the subway stations on Manhattan’s low-lying southern tip. By the time Sandy’s fury was spent, an average 40 ft of beachfront had been swallowed up along the entire 150-mile Jersey Shore. 350,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, while losses stood at $75b in the United States alone (Trenberth et al. 2015).

Social historians Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg cite the example of Sandy – and its disproportionate impacts on Haiti and the New York/New Jersey area – as an example of the “differentiated vulnerability” of nations in the age of climate change (Malm and Hornborg 2014). Climate change – expressed in weather catastrophes – is a hemispheric political actor with no respect for nation-state boundaries. But Hurricane Sandy highlighted the close correlation between climate change and global inequity. In the aftermath of Sandy, New Jersey called in the National Guard, and pumped billions of dollars into restoring beaches, while Haitians at a more exposed latitude suffered hundreds of casualties, lost entire built communities, and were dependent on foreign aid for survival. The lesson of Sandy: given the same extreme conditions, the misery of global warming will be overwhelmingly visited upon poor, under-resourced populations in the global south.

Malm and Hornborg’s Hurricane Sandy example is part of their larger argument against the Anthropocene as a historical paradigm (published in the inaugural issue of The Anthropocene Review in 2014). For Malm and Hornborg, Anthropocene discourse represents a further unwelcome intrusion of the physical sciences into the critical domain of social science and the humanities. Theorists of the Anthropocene, they argue, favor coarse-grained, deep-time narratives, emphasizing human species evolution from hunter-gatherer communities to sedentary agriculture through to recent industrialization, with an exponential increase in environmental impacts at each developmental stage. This species-level narrative homogenizes humanity, with no recognition that industrialization, most particularly, was shaped and monetized by a core of North Atlantic nations at the expense of the global southern periphery – exploited for its material resources, cheap labor, and unprotected markets. Through the multi-millennial lens of the Anthropocene, these subaltern populations disappear from view.

Malm and Hornborg’s dispute with Anthropocene Studies belongs to a familiar post-colonial critique of first-world environmentalism. What we witnessed with Hurricane Sandy, they argue, was not a new historical phenomenon – the global threat of climate change – but rather the latest episode in a centuries-old tale of European globalization. With a sleight-of-hand characteristic of bourgeois grand narratives, the Anthropocene flattens the nuanced history of culture and power, of global inequity, of differentiated responsibility and suffering, into a planetary drama that quietly forgives all carbon debts.

Significantly, however, support for the Anthropocene paradigm has come from post-colonial writers themselves. In his famous “Climate of History” article of 2009, Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that the geological scale of climate change alters the baseline terms for critique. Theorizing climate change demands a species-level category of human agency and a “deep time” elucidation of world history. Chakrabarty insists, moving forward, on both fine-grained historical differentiation and a planetary, deep-time consciousness – but his critics, including Malm and Hornborg, have caricatured his argument as binary, involving a zero-sum choice between critique and science.

Chakrabarty’s call for a new climate change paradigm has been echoed by, among others, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, in a series of lectures published under the title The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). In Ghosh’s revisionist history of modernity, China enjoyed the benefits of coal for hundreds of years before James Watt’s invention of the steam engine; nineteenth-century Burma was a Petro-State; while industrialization was never a Grand Plan enacted upon an inert global south. Steam-powered mechanization and shipping were, rather, opportune technologies to further Britain’s inchoate economic agenda of capital accumulation, which enabled only the temporary, brutal supremacy of the West over major-power rivals India and China, who have, since the late twentieth century, caught up rapidly. The argument for “differentiated responsibility” still holds, Ghosh argues, but “the complexity of the carbon economy’s genealogy holds a lesson also for those in the global south who would draw a wide and clear line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in relation to global warming” (114). For Ghosh, Malm and Hornborg’s simple dichotomy of industrialized North and impoverished Global South risks reiterating a colonialist narrative in which white Europeans, for good or ill, must always be the active agents, the central players.

Ghosh makes a related point regarding the slipperiness of agency in the age of climate change: global-scale environmental degradation, including climate change, has been a catastrophic outcome of industrialization, but was never its purpose. It is “the unintended consequence,” Ghosh writes, “of the very existence of human beings as a species.” Responsibility is differentiated, yes, but is also a shifting, complex product of time, opportunity, infrastructure, and resource endowment. Historical time, through this lens, refracts and expands telescopically. Liberal historiography emphasizes the technological turning points of modernity – be it the printing press, Watts’ steam engine, or the nuclear reactor. But in the revisionist terms of a long Anthropocene historiography, for the industrial revolution to have occurred at all required cultural antecedents – in technology and social organization – stretching back thousands of years into deep time. “Every human being who has ever lived,” says Ghosh, “has played a part in making us the dominant species on this planet … The events of today’s changing climate … represent the totality of human actions over time” (115).

Much of current writing on the “long” Anthropocene is occupied with detailing this contingent, even chaotic deep time evolution. For Chakrabarty and Ghosh, an Anthropocene historiography presumes the co-dependence of human and natural systems, and a critical realignment commensurate with the existential, species-level threat posed by environmental systems collapse. Through the funhouse mirror of the Anthropocene, the human agent is distorted, elongated, and even at times unrecognizable. By contrast, the Malm and Hornborg critique of the Anthropocene seems itself anthropocentric. Indiscriminate geophysical forces – and the chaos they bring – do not belong within an analytic framework where human agency and government are the first principles and sole unquestioned truths.

Amitav Ghosh calls climate change our “Great Derangement” – an apt catastrophist epithet for our time. In the nineteenth-century natural sciences, French catastrophism, embodied in the writings of Baron Cuvier, stood opposed to the British gradualist school of Hutton and Lyell, which insisted the key to the past lay in the present – that the materials and processes of the Earth, if not its superficial appearances, were constant over geological time. But Cuvierian catastrophism is once again ascendant under the Anthropocene paradigm. In our accelerated climate change regime, the future will not look like the past. In fact, our present is already a “no-analogue state,” as Earth scientists term it (Steffen et al. 2004). The mind-bending challenge for climate scientists and climate historians alike is to describe the ever-shifting conditions of this no-analogue world we inhabit.

To engage the discourse of the Anthropocene, historians cannot avoid the challenge of Deep Time. A century and more since the secularization of Biblical chronology, consciousness of alternative bio- and geological timeframes has belatedly begun to make inroads in the academic humanities, for example, through the sheer persuasive weight of the burgeoning paleoclimate archive. Scientific literacy is indispensable to the scholarly engagement with Deep Time, as the 2010s proliferation of original research in the Little Ice Age period described in this chapter attests. The generation of historians following in its wake enjoys a unique license to embrace deep geological timescales, and the conceptual modalities of the Anthropocene, while remaining fully disciplined period scholars of modernity. With cutting-edge tools to hand, the climate-conscious twenty-first-century historian will integrate a traditional archival, text-based approach with the material scope, data-mining powers, and interpretive reach of multiple scientific disciplines – the better to fashion original narratives of the global past tailored to a messy planetary future.