Climate, weather and social change in seventeenth-century Ireland

Abstract

In attempting to construct a model of social and political change in early modern Europe some historians have turned to climate change as a way of integrating other developments. Climatic deterioration placed pressure on resources that had impacts on population and food supply that generated political crises across the globe. This article points not to the similarities in the changes across Europe but rather on the divergences from the general pattern, especially at the margins such as Ireland where the general model does not seem to apply. By focusing on the everyday experience of climate, weather, this essay argues that the important variable in such change is not climate per se but how local societies reacted to the changing weather patterns and adapted to them. Using the harvest crisis of 1673 as a case study it charts the response in the regions of Ireland to a deterioration of weather and stresses the need for local study of reaction to climatic change rather than global approaches.