Environmental Crises
OVERVIEW
There is an environmental dimension to politics, and the early modern period is no exception. Imperial projects reshaped the natural environment, most obviously in the 'Columbian exchange', the large-scale movement of plants and animals and micro-organisms between Europe and the Americas in the wake of Columbus' voyages. These transfers had devastating effects on landscapes in the Americas, from the forests of Brazil to the soils of Barbados. Back in Europe, rulers grappled with the social unrest that often followed poor harvests, which were in turn related to changes in weather and climate. As states became stronger, so did their capacity to reshape the landscape in their territories, for example by building canals and draining wetlands. State-sponsored engineering projects were often resisted by local people who feared for their customary rights to use land for food, fuel and fun. All this took place in the context of an unusually cool climate in Europe and elsewhere, especially in the seventeenth century. The lecture looks at these and other connections between political and environmental crises.
The seminar follows the same format as the previous one, with one broad question and three argumentative secondary sources that relate to the question. Like last week, your job is to read the three sources and use them to work out your own answer to the question.
DEBATE QUESTION
- did the Little Ice Age cause a global crisis in the early modern period?
ESSENTIAL READING
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, abridged and revised ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), ‘Introduction: The Little Ice Age and the General Crisis’, pp. xix–xxviii.
Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ‘Introduction: Crisis and Opportunity in a Changing Climate’, pp. 1–21.
Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2020), ‘Conclusion’, pp. 250–56.
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RECOMMENDED READING
Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Polity, 2010), chap. 3 ('Global Cooling: The Little Ice Age') and chap. 4 ('Cultural Consequences of the Little Ice Age').
John Morgan, ‘Environments,’ in Beat Kümin (ed.), The European World, 1500-1800, 4thedn. (2022), pp. 64-75.
FURTHER READING
On climate:
Sherry Johnson, ‘When Good Climates Go Bad: Pivot Phases, Extreme Events, and the Opportunities for Climate History’, Environmental History (2014), pp. 329–37
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Doubleday, 1971)
Christian Pfister, ‘Climatic Extremes, Recurrent Crises and Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, The Medieval History Journal 10, 1–2 (2007), pp. 33–73
Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)
On environmental history more generally:
Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (New York, 2003 [1973])
Afred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Elly Robson Dezateux, Violent Waters: Environmental Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Thorkild Kjaergaard, The Danish Revolution: An Ecohistorical Interpretation, trans. David Hohnen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, The Human Planet:How We Created the Anthropocene (London: Penguin, 2018), esp. ‘Introduction: The Meaning of the Anthropocene’, pp. 1–16
Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London, 1982)
Sara Miglietti and John Morgan (eds.), Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2017)
Ryan Tucker Jones, ‘The Environment’, in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 121–42
'A Winter Scene of Skaters Near a Castle,' by the Dutch artist Hendrik Avercamp, c. 1610. Canals and rivers froze over in the unusual cold of the 17th century. The scene is harmonious, but the effects of climate change were not always positive.