“It’s the Climate, Stupid”: A review essay of Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey; and Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

Increase Mather had gout in his hands. It flared up in the cold. The 1690s must have been trying for him, because that decade, almost everywhere, was frigid. “It has been a severe pinching winter,” he complained in his diary in 1698. “The dumb creatures perish.” Not only was it deeply, bitterly cold; it was also dry. New England grew thirsty in the late 1690s during a “sore and Long continued drought,” “distresing in almost all places.” Crops came up short, and people went hungry. “Tis such a Time of scarcity as the like never was,” Mather wrote. Unfortunately for those living in the Northeast, this distress coincided with another calamity: war. In Europe men were fighting the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97), which erupted in England’s North American colonies as King William’s War and inaugurated decades of violence between New England, New France, and Native allies. The weather worsened the war’s miseries. In some places, rotten corn was all that could be gotten. Men stole from the mills anyway. “Never did I heare such a cry for bread,” wrote Joanna Cotton in 1697. She feared French and Indian raids, but she also worried about hunger. In other letters and diaries, too, “wars & scarcity” appear together, as if moving hand in hand.¹

The link has been less visible to historians. Much has been written about war in the colonies, but less about cold. Climate has not been a prominent theme in recent studies of early America. How did the vicissitudes of weather, as well as more long-term changes in climate, shape early American and Atlantic history? To date, it is hard to say. Scholars have long known that European expansion took place during the Little Ice Age, a global cooling period that lasted—arguably—from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. No one is quite sure what caused this chilly trend, but thanks to emerging climate data we do know what years were chilliest. The 1690s were outstandingly cold years, possibly the coldest in centuries. It was a miserable decade across the Northern Hemisphere. Famine in Estonia killed tens of thousands. Scotland starved, during seven “ill years” of economic disaster and bad harvests. Is this the War of the League of Augsburg’s wider context? Did colonists suffer simply because the war “impoverish[ed] them”?² Or did the biting weather contribute to the violence? Few have asked. Early America’s climate history is still considerably unexplored. But, backed by clues from stalactites, glacial ice cores, and the squiggly circles of tree rings, among other evidence touted as the “new climate science,” scholars are beginning to turn their attention to such stories. Two new global histories of climate, by John L. Brooke and Geoffrey Parker, offer glimpses of the way forward.

Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global History is a big book. It covers the entire earth, through all of human history. Like other recent practitioners of “big” or “deep” history, he tells the human story on an evolutionary scale.³ While others have also crashed through the barriers of what was once called “prehistory” and have made grand global claims without relying primarily on written records, Brooke is the first to examine the twists and turns of the human experience using hard climate science. His object is to understand the role of nature—or, more precisely, climate—in human history. In Brooke’s view, it is a vital role. Climate, he argues, has driven the course of humanity’s fate, generally, including the “pattern and...