A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America by Anya Zilberstein (review)

In this examination of historical understandings of the climate of northeastern colonial America, Anya Zilberstein "demonstrates the ineluctable ways in which political disputes, economic interests, and cultural values mediated ideas, interpretations, and responses to weather and climate in the past" (15). In general, the book consists of individual chapters, each of which are informative and interesting, but lacks an overall structure that successfully and continuously holds the individual pieces together as a collective whole. The book is divided into two parts. The first of which is about the larger context of environmental knowledge in what Zilberstein calls the anglophone Atlantic World and what role colonial elites played within that sphere of knowledge. The first chapter focuses on early observations of the environment of the northeast and argues that the conflicting accounts of that nature and the shifting political borders of colonial America made it difficult to present a generally accepted view of colonial environments. Zilberstein argues that this confusion led to critiques of climate theory in favour of empirical and first-hand observations. The second chapter explores the networks established by colonial elites who had an interest in natural history, which was more of a sophisticated hobby than an academic discipline. This large amount of contextual information, which constitutes about half of the book's total volume, makes this book a good read for upper-level undergraduates enrolled in an environmental history seminar. The book provides plenty of background on the role of natural history in elite colonial society and thus will do a fine job at guiding students to an understanding of the larger factors influencing the desire to know more about the climate of the northeast and how that knowledge might be used for political or economic purposes. Yet, for those already versed in this context, which is pretty well laid out in existing historiography, it can be a bit frustrating to weed through so much material before getting to the specifics of how colonial elites understood climate.

This specific inquiry into the ideas of climate change in colonial northeastern America comes in the second part of the book. The second part of Chapter 3, and Chapters 4 and 5, along with the introduction, are the most interesting parts of the book. Chapter 3 provides a very good history of settlers' perceptions of weather, their articulation of the positive value of cold and snow, and the need to address climate, or, more specifically, the bad reputation of the northeastern climate, in colonization schemes.

Chapter 4 explores John Wentworth's effort during the last years of the eighteenth century to settle Jamaican Maroon deportees in Nova Scotia. Zilberstein articulates how Wentworth's effort to resettle these deportees in Nova Scotia was really a venture to prove to the rest of the world that Nova Scotia was habitable. This chapter provides great insight, not on the social history of the Maroons but, rather, on the elites' views of race and climate. Although this chapter is really a case study, Zilberstein does a fine job at presenting the wider ideas about race and climate as expressed by elite observers throughout the anglophone Atlantic world. She discusses different ideas about black resistance to tropical diseases (130), the "invigorating" aspects of cold weather (133), and the dangers of tropical heat to cultural volatility (136). At the end of Chapter 4, Zilberstein places this specific case study into a larger context of how climate determinism played a role in abolitionism. By covering such a rich field of analysis, this chapter would be an excellent source for teaching a wide variety of subjects in history.

Chapter 5 is a rather abrupt shift from Chapter 4, making the two read more like individual articles rather than two parts of a whole. This chapter explores the history of agricultural improvement in late colonial America. Although other historians have thoroughly discussed elite ideas concerning agricultural improvements, Zilberstein argues that they have overlooked that "climate itself...