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The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850
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Review
"Fagan shows in this wonderful book how vulnerable human society is to climatic zigzags."―New Scientist"Even without the contemporary relevance lent the book by the specter of global warming, The Little Ice Age would be an engrossing historical volume."―Boston Globe"The Little Ice Age could do for the historical study of climate what Foucault's Madness and Civilization did for the historical study of mental illness: make it a respectable subject for scholarly inquiry."―Scientific American"A nimble, lively, provocative book."―Booklist
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About the Author
Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has written many internationally acclaimed popular books about archaeology, including The Little Ice Age, The Great Warming, and The Long Summer. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
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Product details
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (December 27, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465022723
ISBN-13: 978-0465022724
Product Dimensions:
5.4 x 0.8 x 8.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
151 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#94,043 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I bought this book because I expected to enjoy it, but although I read the whole thing, only one chapter, on the Irish Famine, actually held my interest. The problem with the other chapters is that they are so diffuse that they end up seeming to say almost nothing. The weather, it is a'changin, is the theme, and it is supported by paragraph after paragraph of sweeping generalizations. Yes, there are small anecdotes scattered throughout to enliven the weather-reporting, but in the end, they all blur together.Picture reading a summary of the weather in the United States over the past 10 years, and you will have a very good idea of how this book reads: Some regions experienced extreme cold and snow during the winter, while other areas in the west were dry and sunny.l The springs were warmer than average, rainfall was heavy, and there were hurricanes and tornadoes in the south. Now stretch that out for page after page and see if your head does not begin to nod.The thesis of the book is that, well, we can't engage in environmental determinism, because that is an academic taboo, but we can say that the climate has changed and that history has happened, and that there seems that there might be a connection. Not very compelling, is it? *Of course* changes in climate *cause* changes in human behavior and thus in history! If the area where you can or cannot grow food changes, then that will perforce change where people live and how they live, and that's history! Was the French revolution caused by the extreme poverty of French peasants, and by the fact that their overlords seemed to have no interest in how they produced the food they all needed? Who can doubt it? And does climate affect the ability to grow food? Obviously!The one chapter that really hung together was An Ghorta Mor, about the Great Hunger in Ireland caused by the failure of the potato crop. For the first time in the whole book, the author slows down and focuses on a single region and a single period of time, rather than sweeping from decade to decade and place to place. And that works. But mostly you read things like, "Weather in northern Europe was extremely cold. The rivers in xyz froze over. New Zealand, meanwhile, was also cold, and there was famine in China." Just too broad to be of any interest to read.Some people complain about the fact that the author tacks on comments about our current Global Warming controversy (if controversy it is) and appends a chapter at the end making a somewhat half-hearted argument that yes, global warming is real, it is man-made, and it might be bad. I really don't care by the time I get to that chapter, because he has already demonstrated to my satisfaction that the climate has changed many times and we don't really know why. If a Little Ice Age brings suffering, might a warm age actually ameliorate human life in some way? Maybe. Might it spur new technologies? Probably. This is hardly a screed telling me to give up my car and ride a bike to work. All the evidence herein suggests that mainly, we don't know, the patterns are irregular and hard to interpret, and that extreme cold is no picnic for human civilizations.One other point that deserves mention is the choice to use metric measurements throughout the book. Ok, I get it, as Americans, we are the only ones who aren't very familiar with those measurements. But the intro gives false information about the relationship between kilometers and miles. And then throughout the rest of the book, I would have to mentally translate every fact: winters were 2 degrees C. colder, and the glaciers advanced 2.5 kilometers down into the valleys. Often, instead of absolute numbers, we are given comparisons, but all this just makes it hard for me to form a mental image of what it was like. New York was 2 degrees C colder than 10 years before, and there were 28 days of below-zero weather. (Is that below zero C? If so, isn't that pretty much what winter is?)I really expected to be interested in the daily life of Europeans from 1300-1850 and how weather impacted them, but in the end, I didn't feel that I got that. Maybe it's because the facts are just so diffuse--no trend is obvious enough close-up to make much of a picture. But I think the author made many bad choices, giving us too many broad statements and not enough picturable narratives.
Archeologist Brian Fagan has been in the forefront of studying how climate affects civilization over time for more than two decades. This important study suggests that in recorded history there is evidence of fundamental shifts in climate, and each has portended changes--sometimes drastic ones--that affected the human population. His specific subject this time was a colder period during the later Middle Ages and the early modern era in Europe and how this affected the European civilization. Based on a variety of sources ranging from historical documents to analysis of tree rings and deep ice cores, the period between about 1300 and 1850 was marked by a cooling trend around the world.Known as the "Little Ice Age" this era was actually a period of modest cooling following the mediaeval warming period that lasted into the twelfth century. Coined by François E. Matthes in 1939 there is little agreement either as to the start and end dates for the "Little Ice Age," or the extent of the cooling that took place. There does seem to have been three specific cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last coming in the 1850s.Brian Fagan's fascinating book offers in an accessible manner a study of this event in history, laying out its complexities, its disputes, and its evidence. At a core level he emphasizes how these changes in climate affected life in Europe, its population, its food supply, etc. In some respects it is easy to assess the role of these changes in European history. Fagan makes the case that the storm that decimated the Spanish Armada in 1588 was in part the result of climatic shifts. So too, was the cooling trend that forced the Norse out of Greenland in the thirteen century. The famines of the mediaeval era also seem to have been in part the result of the "Little Ice Age." This may well have been a contributing factor to the bread riots in Paris that helped foment the French Revolution of 1789, when grain harvests suffered and grain became much more precious and food shortages resulted.Fagan makes a convincing case that climate change in general, and the "Little Ice Age" in particular, affected the structure of European civilization, and such dramatic--even cataclysmic--events as those mentioned above are very real and quite significant factors to which not enough historians have paid serious attention. The real challenge, and Fagan admits this as well, is in determining how much of these major events in human history may be attributed to climate change and how much to other factors. It's a difficult question and one that requires considerable analysis.I really wonder how close to the edge of a precipice modern society truly is, when considering such things as climate change. Could we see in the twenty-first century major shifts in history due to changes in the climate? Conceivably we are already starting to see food shortages, water shortages, etc., because of climate change. What might it portend for the future? Exploring part relations between climate change and civilization might help to illuminate some of these concerns. Working in this arena really does move one beyond nationalist narratives and into global themes. I would like to see more efforts by historians and other social scientists along these lines."The Little Ice Age" is an excellent, accessible introduction to a complex topic in human history. It is only, however, the starting point for considering a fascinating topic.
This book is written for the average reader, and is not a scholarly work.The author is a professor of archeology at UCSB. A wonderful book of facts and information on the climate during the "Little Ice Age". Scientists have collected a good deal of information on the Little Ice Age, as it is recent enough that written records were kept and are available from many parts of the world. These written records provide information about when the Thames river froze, and when crops were planted and harvested in many parts of the world. Theses bits of information can and have been put together to provide information on the Little Ice Age. Mankind certainly cannot blame the Little Ice Age on mankind and his emission of too much CO2, as the industrial age did not start until about 1750, which was the last part of the Little Ice Age.Would that more people would read this book and that we could have an informed discussion of the climate based on facts, and not just emotion and pseudo facts.
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