The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea

David N. Livingstone. Princeton Univ., $38 (552p) ISBN 978-0-691-23670-4

This sweeping chronicle from Livingstone (Dealing with Darwin), a geography professor emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast, delves into how humans have understood the climate’s influence on health, psychology, war, and wealth from 400 BCE to the present. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was among the first to propose a connection between illness and the weather (he believed cold northern winds caused dysentery), a tradition that gave rise to the 18th-century field of medical geography, certain practitioners of which posited that abrupt changes in temperature drive disease. The most illuminating material describes how starting in the 18th century, European countries employed climatic explanations to justify their imperial conquests. For instance, 19th-century Swiss American geologist Arnold Guyot’s argument that the harsh winters in northern climates encouraged forethought while the plenitude of the tropics promoted indolence was used to legitimize New World slavery. Elsewhere, Livingstone explores how scholars from the 14th-century through the present have theorized that climate’s effects on individuals’ character explains why civilizational wealth appears to increase with distance from the equator and contends that attributing such recent conflicts as the war in Darfur to climate change risks imbuing them with a “fatalist sense of naturalistic inevitability.” The prose can be dense, but Livingstone’s consummate analysis drives home how blaming people’s behavior on climate risks repeating the imperious and racist justifications for colonialism and slavery. Though sometimes tough reading, this is well worth the effort. (Apr.)