"..Since ancient times, the idea that the climate exerts a determining influence on minds and bodies, health and well-being, customs and character, war and wealth has attracted a long line of committed followers.” Alarm over climate change brought about by anthropogenic global warming has renewed—or perhaps simply enhanced—an idea with a very long history. It was after all in 1748 when Montesquieu wrote that the “empire of climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires.” But intellectual attentiveness to climate predates that remark by at least two millennia. 

In my guest David Livingstone’s new book The Empire of Climate:  A History of an Idea, his object is to “take a measure of this impulse over the longue durée.” To do that he travels from the Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places, to seemingly the very latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change, scaling a mountain of literature between those two points. 

David N. Livingstone is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author and joint editor of numerous books which congregate around the histories of geographical knowledge, the spatiality of scientific culture, and the historical geographies of science and religion. 

For Further Investigation

For some past HT episodes related to climate see Episode 156: Stories Told by Trees;  Episode 209: Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith, and Episode 340: Price of Collapse

Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore:  Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (University of California Press, 1967)

Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (University of California Press, 1996)

Mike Hulme, “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism.” Osiris 26 Klima (2011): 245–266

Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (MIT Press, 2016)

Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018)