The Empire of Climate

Given the growing threat that climate change poses for the future of humanity, Livingstone’s magisterial survey of historical ideas about climate’s impact on individuals and societies could not be more timely or cautionary. Due attention is given to Hippocrates, Ibn Khaldun, Montesquieu, and other classic progenitors of ideas about climate’s power over people, but the book’s primary focus is on the plethora of mainly Western scientists, philosophers, geographers, historians, economists, and other so-called thought leaders who have advanced theories over the past two centuries about how climate has shaped human evolution and personal experience. The troubling theme that threads through this intellectual tradition is its climatic determinism.Livingstone’s meticulous genealogy of ideas about the “empire of climate” focuses on four main categories of human experience—health, mind, wealth, and war. Medical geography, medical climatology, and biometeorology pathologized certain parts of the world as innately unhealthy. The tropics in particular were seen as zones of decay where dark-skinned inhabitants lacked drive while light-skinned sojourners faced degeneration. These racialized distinctions extended to the realm of the mind, with various medical and other authorities attributing different mental capacities, moods, and behaviors to the effects of different climates. Once again, the tropics were deemed deficient, hindering indigenes’ brain development and eroding colonists’ mental well-being. Meanwhile, many economists, historians, and others drew a causal connection between climate and wealth, arguing that temperate conditions contributed to the economic prosperity of Europe and the United States while heat and humidity inhibited development in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Climatic arguments were also used, especially in America, to rationalize the use of African slave labor on plantations.The final category, the connection between climate and conflict, has attracted increased attention in recent years. Although this issue has not always aligned with the temperate/tropical divide—historians, for example, have explored possible connections between the Little Ice Age and the political upheavals of the seventeenth century—much of the recent debate about the national security implications of climate change has focused on the Global South, which is presumed to be especially susceptible to disorder due to climatic imperatives. Although Livingstone’s inquiry ranges far more widely than this brief summary can communicate, one of its persistent concerns is “the way in which climate all too frequently has been implicated in questions of racial difference” (407).The main reason “racial difference” figured so prominently in the intellectual tradition that Livingstone skillfully dissects is that it was almost exclusively Euro-American in origin and imperial in purpose. The climatic musings originally offered by Hippocrates and Ibn Khaldun were resurrected and repurposed by European and American intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to rationalize their global dominance, which was portrayed as the inevitable outcome of natural laws. With the shift over the past half-century from a Euro-American to a multi-polar world system, many of the leading proponents of climatic theories have lapsed into well-deserved obscurity. All the more reason, then, for Livingstone to remind us that they were once widely read, well respected, and highly influential.But why revisit their discredited ideas? Livingstone argues that the climatic determinism that they did so much to promote is experiencing something of a comeback. Each section of the book closes with a discussion of recent works that echo this earlier intellectual tradition in its commentary on climatic change. Livingstone’s book, then, is a cautionary tale, a warning about the ways our assessment of climate’s influence on humanity can be distorted to demean certain peoples and promote the interests of others

Ancient history · Empire · Environmental ethics · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Philosophy