Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (review)

Abstract

One always needs to be wary of publisher's claims, and the jacket of this publication proves no exception. Fagan's work is heralded as a "dazzlingly new book [that] shows that short-term climate shifts have [End Page 186] been a major--and hitherto unrecognized--force in history." Readers with only a passing awareness of the Annales School will realize the hyperbole. Historians have long been mindful of climate's impact upon farming, settlement, and demography, just as they have been mindful of the institutional, economic, and social shifts that climate change can bring. And as Annales historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie highlights in his essay "History and Climate," historians have also been wary of "that empty form of determinism which gratuitously attache[s] a climatic explanation to every large-scale economic or demographic event that could not easily be explained otherwise." Richard Grove, an environmental historian who has done much to advance our knowledge of the connections between global history and extreme weather events, is occasionally guilty of this. Grove argues in Nature and the Orient that the El Niño of 1877 -79 caused the Indian famine. But the Indian famine occurred in 1876 -77 , before the El Niño episode. Elsewhere Grove is correct. In Ecology, Climate and Empire he writes of the growing global environmental crisis over pollution, climate change, and resource depletion. The seeds of these contemporary problems were sown in a previous era of European expansion marked by economic and ecological imperialism. This "fateful globalization" continues to transform the natural and social worlds, forcing an environmental agenda on historians and a historical agenda on scientists.