Montesquieu’s observation in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) that the ‘empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires’ captures an ancient and persistent human tendency to see climate as history’s ultimate driver. David Livingstone’s ambitious and important new study traces how ‘climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control, labor power, and race relations’ (p. 401) from ancient times to the present. This is an important book that arrives at the right time. As climate reconstructions and cultural climate histories have exploded over the last ten to twenty years, and as impacts of climate change across all facets of society generate widespread anxiety, we need sophisticated frameworks for understanding how climate arguments have been used – and misused – throughout history.
The complexities of integrating human societies with Earth system science make this extraordinarily challenging but essential work. There is little agreement between disciplines about how to integrate historical and scientific data on the same scale, and most climate historians live in fear of being accused of ‘climate determinism’ – a catch-all phrase that can efficiently consign some climate history to oblivion.
Livingstone takes an objective course throughout, highlighting ‘contemporary anxieties’ with an aim to ‘better equip our own society for the climatic challenges that we all face’ (p. 11). To be sure, the intellectual topography that Livingstone takes us through is full of difficult terrain, particularly the old racist attitudes that have tended to link people and regions to climatic conditions, which can still undergird modern assumptions of predicted impacts of climate change. His approach allows him to trace intellectual genealogies without getting mired in contemporary debates, but sometimes leaves readers wanting more explicit guidance on how to distinguish legitimate climate analysis from simple, deterministic explanations.
Four key themes form the core of the book: (1) bodies/health: from Hippocrates’s On Airs, Waters, and Places linking climate to health and moral tendencies, through to European colonial views of tropical climates as unhealthy and morally corrupt; (2) minds: how climate has been linked to cognition and human evolution and psychological effects like seasonal affective disorder, depression and aggression; (3) wealth: climate explanations for industrial development, market performance and economic breakdown, including justifications for slavery in the American South; and finally (4) war: climate as explanation for warfare and civil conflict and its role in contemporary climate security discourse. We are given much to think about.
Livingstone demonstrates, for example, how southern intellectuals used climatic arguments to justify the plantation system, arguing that the hot, humid climate made slave labour not just economically necessary but morally inevitable – a ‘natural’ adaptation to environmental conditions. Perhaps most troubling are early twentieth-century figures like Ellsworth Huntington, who weaponized climate theory to support immigration restrictions, arguing that only certain climates produced ‘racially fit’ populations capable of democratic governance. Huntington’s association with the American Eugenics Society – he served as its president from 1934 to 1938 – has rightly consigned much of his work to the historical dustbin. Such work was dangerous. Yet he was on to a good track in his early use of tree rings in his treatment of Maya droughts.
If climate reconstructions are central to arguments from new data, this work has tended to ‘favor causation over correlation, assertion over argument, declaration over documentation’ (p. 7). Of course, historical causation is notoriously complex, but Livingstone is correct to urge us all to be careful about the limits of the evidence (spatial and temporal), and the mechanisms behind change. The very best contemporary work in historical climatology is sophisticated, nuanced, aware of coupled natural–human system dynamics and sensitive to social hierarchies and human suffering. This methodological sophistication matters especially when considering contemporary applications.
In some current debates about the Anthropocene, the historical experience of climate change is considered irrelevant – the rate of warming is outside human experience in the past. But I am deeply sympathetic to Livingstone’s argument that history matters for contemporary climate policy and communication. It matters too to the thoughtful public who care about human experience, rather than the simplistic ‘it’s all going to be a disaster’ or the ‘there is no climate change’ crowd. The book, in fact, can be a critical tool in reasoned debates about how humans and human societies can better respond to climate change and other stresses.
Empire of Climate is a wonderful and critically important book for historians and geographers, but also for journalists, policymakers and the public. Perhaps the single most important lesson from contemporary climate history is that to explain historical change, it can never simply be about climate or climate change. Historical change never has a single cause, and climate is never the full story. What palaeoclimatology, high-resolution proxy data, and better model outputs do is force historians to be better historians – recognizing the multi-causal complexity that makes human societies resilient and adaptable rather than simply vulnerable to environmental forces.
