The Empire of Climate
A History of an Idea
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- 32,99 €
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- 32,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
How the specter of climate has been used to explain history since antiquity
Scientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet and may even bring about the extinction of our species. Yet behind these anxieties lies an older, much deeper fear about the power that climate exerts over us. The Empire of Climate traces the history of this idea and its pervasive influence over how we interpret world events and make sense of the human condition, from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to the afflictions of the modern psyche.
Taking readers from the time of Hippocrates to the unfolding crisis of global warming today, David Livingstone reveals how climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control and race relations; been used to explain industrial development, market performance, and economic breakdown; and served as a bellwether for national character and cultural collapse. He examines how climate has been put forward as an explanation for warfare and civil conflict, and how it has been identified as a critical factor in bodily disorders and acute psychosis.
A panoramic work of scholarship, The Empire of Climate maps the tangled histories of an idea that has haunted our collective imagination for centuries, shedding critical light on the notion that everything from the wealth of nations to the human mind itself is subject to climate’s imperial rule.
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This sweeping chronicle by Livingstone (Dealing with Darwin), a geography professor emeritus at Queen's University Belfast, delves into how humans have understood the climate's influence on health, psychology, war, and wealth from 400 BCE to the present. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was among the first to propose a connection between illness and the weather (he believed cold northern winds caused dysentery), a tradition that gave rise to the 18th-century field of medical geography, certain practitioners of which posited that abrupt changes in temperature drive disease. The most illuminating material describes how starting in the 18th century, European countries employed climatic explanations to justify their imperial conquests. For instance, 19th-century Swiss American geologist Arnold Guyot's argument that the harsh winters in northern climates encouraged forethought while the plenitude of the tropics promoted indolence was used to legitimize New World slavery. Elsewhere, Livingstone explores how scholars from the 14th-century through the present have theorized that climate's effects on individuals' character explains why civilizational wealth appears to increase with distance from the equator and contends that attributing such recent conflicts as the war in Darfur to climate change risks imbuing them with a "fatalist sense of naturalistic inevitability." The prose can be dense, but Livingstone's consummate analysis drives home how blaming people's behavior on climate risks repeating the imperious and racist justifications for colonialism and slavery. Though sometimes tough reading, this is well worth the effort.
