Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (review)

Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations. By BRIAN FAGAN. New York: Basic Books, 1999 . Pp. xix + 275 + index. $25 (cloth).

One always needs to be wary of publisher's claims, and the jacket of this publication proves no exception. Fagan's work is heralded as a "dazzlingly new book [that] shows that short-term climate shifts have been a major--and hitherto unrecognized--force in history." Readers with only a passing awareness of the Annales School will realize the hyperbole. Historians have long been mindful of climate's impact upon farming, settlement, and demography, just as they have been mindful of the institutional, economic, and social shifts that climate change can bring. And as Annales historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie highlights in his essay "History and Climate," historians have also been wary of "that empty form of determinism which gratuitously attache[s] a climatic explanation to every large-scale economic or demographic event that could not easily be explained otherwise." Richard Grove, an environmental historian who has done much to advance our knowledge of the connections between global history and extreme weather events, is occasionally guilty of this. Grove argues in Nature and the Orient that the El Niño of 1877 -79 caused the Indian famine. But the Indian famine occurred in 1876 -77 , before the El Niño episode. Elsewhere Grove is correct. In Ecology, Climate and Empire he writes of the growing global environmental crisis over pollution, climate change, and resource depletion. The seeds of these contemporary problems were sown in a previous era of European expansion marked by economic and ecological imperialism. This "fateful globalization" continues to transform the natural and social worlds, forcing an environmental agenda on historians and a historical agenda on scientists.

It is precisely in this spirit of interdisciplinarity that Fagan's book proceeds. As he notes in his preface: "Until recently, scientists studying ancient civilizations and those specializing in El Niño barely spoke to one another. Now they work closely together, for they realize that this once-obscure Peruvian countercurrent" can change the tide of world history, for El Niño "is a small part of an enormous global climatic system that has affected humans in every corner of the world" (p. xiv). Such discoveries force us to reassess our opinions. Fagan uses present scientific breakthroughs to illuminate our pre-modern past. These serve as sobering reminders that contemporary civilizations are still under climatic threat. The point is well intended if a little overstated: "Overpopulation and its consequences, global warming, or rapid climate change alone will not destroy our civilization. But the combination of the three makes us vulnerable to the forces of climate as never before" (p. xviii, emphasis added).

Fagan breaks Floods, Famines and Emperors into three parts: "The Christmas Child," "El Niños in Antiquity" and "Climate Change and the Stream of Time." Part One discusses the scientific identification of El Niño and its place within the global weather system. El Niños occur when a large body of warm water accumulates in the central Pacific and moves eastwards. This lessens the northeast trade winds or changes their direction entirely. Humid air is then brought to South America's west coast and "normal" weather patterns are reversed. Up until the 1960 s El Niño (the child Jesus) was perceived as a localized Peruvian event, so named by Paita sailors for its appearance shortly after Christmas. Now we realize its global import. As Fagan notes, "The deserts west of the Andes can receive their entire average annual rainfall in a day, while the rain forests of Southeast Asia and Borneo turn as dry as tinder" (p. xiv).

The breakthrough in our understanding is attributed to Jacob Bjerknes. It was Bjerknes who linked the eastern Pacific's warm water anomalies with large-scale swings in air pressure across...