November 1, 2022

The collapse of South America's Moche civilization in 700 C.E. owing to El Ni�o. The advent of the Vikings owing to massive crop failure. Colonial expansion in 1700s North America linked to burgeoning solar flares. Volcanic eruptions that led to the end of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford professor Frankopan (The New Silk Roads) shows how climate change has shaped world history while also arguing that many empires fell because they failed to act sustainably.

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Starred review from February 27, 2023
In this sweeping history, Oxford historian Frankopan (The New Silk Roads) explores how climate has shaped human history, and how humans have shaped the climate in return. He suggests that climate is a “crucial and much overlooked theme in global history” with sometimes catastrophic consequences, such as when volcanic eruptions around the world in the 530s and ’40s belched a stratospheric haze that dimmed the sun and caused global cooling, crop failures, and famine. Industrialization, the author contends, marked a turning point in humanity’s relationship with the environment as pollution, deforestation, and the depletion of resources posed formidable threats to civilization (he notes the High Plains aquifer crucial to U.S. agriculture is being depleted faster than rainfall can replenish it). Frankopan shows that while environmental upheaval has been a constant presence roiling human affairs, what’s varied has been the ability of societies to adapt. Indus Valley denizens, for example, successfully diversified their crops to adjust to erratic precipitation around 2000 BCE, but less lucky were Chinese citizens under the 10th century Tang Dynasty, which was overthrown after leaders failed to effectively respond to difficulties caused by drought. Frankopan demonstrates an impressive mastery of anthropological, historical, and meteorological literature, and his scrupulously evenhanded analysis carefully notes uncertainties in scientific and historical evidence. Elegant and cogently argued, this illuminates an age-old and urgently important dynamic.

March 1, 2023
A scholarly assessment of the long-standing human habit of altering the environment to increasingly devastating consequences. "Rather as a doctor should have full knowledge of an illness before trying to devise a cure, so too is investigating the causes of the current problems essential if we are to suggest a way to deal with the crises now confronting us all." So writes Oxford historian Frankopan, enumerating the many environmental challenges we face. It's no secret that the environment shapes history--e.g., in such events as the Mongol failure to invade Japan thanks to an intervening typhoon or Hitler's failure to take Moscow because of the brutal Russian winter. However, as the author shows, environment doesn't explain all: "Overambitious objectives, inefficient supply lines, poor strategic decisions and worse execution of plans on the ground" doomed both Hitler's and Napoleon's Russian campaigns just as much as the weather did. Mix poor decisions and incomplete knowledge with an attempt to conquer nature, and you get trouble, as when the Mesopotamian state rose concurrently with its mastery of irrigated agriculture only to watch as its fields were covered with salts from the desert's hard water, a problem reiterated millennia later in British Imperial India. Frankopan writes that his intention is to meld the environment into the historical narrative, extending that study far into the past, as when he proposes that Neanderthals declined in Europe in a time of widespread climate change to which they were less able to adapt than the Homo sapiens around them. The author negotiates the difficult matter of environmental determinism well, although he does adduce some suggestive stuff--for instance, that the naturally richest agricultural areas of the South, the sites of the most intensive use of slave labor in America, "are more likely today not only to vote Republican, but to oppose affirmative action and express racial resentment and sentiments towards black people." A deep, knowledgeable dive into environmental history that doesn't offer much hope of a course correction.

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March 15, 2023
Anxious about climate change, Oxford historian Frankopan surveys all of human history, looking for patterns of adaptation and traces of resilience. Since its creation, Earth's climate has proven neither static nor keeping to any essential balance. Humans have existed for as little as 0.0001 percent of the planet's history and interactions with the climate have shaped human existence perhaps more than any other single factor. The ever-expanding science of climate history indicates a two-way dialogue between humans and the climate, humans coping with drought, deluge, and pandemic while also distorting or destroying ecosystems with our actions. Mapping historical, anthropological, and economic narratives against mountains of climate data, Frankopan correlates periods of instability to shifts in weather patterns, ocean currents, and seismic events. And if the human species has frequently survived existential peril--the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, volcanic mega-eruptions--the threats to our collective future are massive and unprecedented. The future favors agile societies that act proactively to mitigate risk. Propelled by Frankopan's global scope and interdisciplinary legwork, the resulting synthesis is ambitious, nervous, and impressive.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.