“Mutilating the Historian”: the Historiography of Climate Determinism

James Collier, University of Sydney
History in the Making, Vol 6 (December 2018)

Historians can play a role in understanding modern anthropogenic climate change by using their skills, in cooperation with other disciplines, to understand past climates and the human responses to those climates. Yet the scholarship on the influence of climate on human history has a chequered past, and remains controversial. This article traces some of that chequered past by examining the historiography of climate determinism, the idea that climate influences human society. The article traces the debate about climate determinism from the ancient Greeks, through the racist determinism of twentieth-century American geographers, to the beginning of historical scholarship on climate by the Annales historians, and finally to contemporary climate neodeterminism. The investigation concludes that today’s climate neodeterminism bears some similarities to earlier iterations of the idea, and that twentieth-century racist determinism continues to make historians wary of climate history. However, the field of climate history needs the archival and narrative skills of historians, particularly to put a human face on the statistical models of climatic stimulus and human response developed by climate scientists.

When discussing the historian’s role in climate scholarship, twentieth-century scholar Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie memorably intoned that “it is mutilating the historian to make him into no more than a specialist in humanity”.[1] This article is, in a sense, a meditation on that mutilation. The idea that nature plays a significant role in human history is sometimes expressed as “nature or culture” and at other times is labelled as environmental determinism. Whatever the label, the influence of nature on human history has been debated by scholars since the ancient Greeks. This article investigates the historiography of the nature or culture debate with specific reference to the works of historians on the influence of climate on human history. In addition, the article explores the role of historians in scholarship on the impact of anthropogenic climate change.

Before proceeding further, the use of the word “determinism” needs to be clarified. The article seeks to avoid the pejorative associations of the word in historical scholarship, which is partly due to the legacy of past racist misuse of the term. Moreover, the article does not employ determinism in the manner of Hayden White, as an immutable and directly causal connection between events.[2] Instead, determinism here will convey a substantial, but not the only, influence on human history. With this in mind, I argue that the debate among scholars about the role of nature or culture has come full circle. That debate has circumnavigated from the overt determinism of ancient Greek writers, via racist determinism in the early twentieth century, to the first cautious steps into interdisciplinary determinism and back again in the form of contemporary “neodeterminism”.[3] Finally, I argue for a greater role by historians in contemporary climate change research.

The article proceeds in four parts. First, it explores the nature or culture argument in the works of Hippocrates and Herodotus, including the debate about their environmental determinism among modern historians. Second, it offers an evaluation of the racist interpretation of nature or culture in the early twentieth century, particularly in the works of Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple. Third, it discusses the interdisciplinary determinism in the works of historians since World War Two, with an emphasis on Annales historians Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and climate historian Christian Pfister. Finally, it examines the relationship between modern historical scholarship and climate science, including the contribution that historians can make to understanding climate change. Because a complete historiography of environmental determinism is beyond the space available here, the scope of the article is limited to the historians outlined above. Further, while environmental determinism takes many forms, this article will focus on the debate about the impact of climate on human history. Climate is a key notion to explore because its influence on human history was debated by all of the historians discussed here, and because modern anthropogenic climate change makes understanding the influence of climate on past societies particularly relevant.

Overt determinism: Hippocrates and Herodotus

The argument in this article that the works of Hippocrates and Herodotus exhibit climate determinism is one which is debated by modern scholars, who contend that the two ancient Greek writers considered culture as a greater determinant than nature.[4] Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places is essentially a long argument for the direct influence of environment, particularly climate, on humans and their society. Hippocrates argues for determinism on a continental scale by comparing Europeans and “Asiatics”, and he claims that the character of Asiatics is mild because of the agreeable nature of their environment, and that the European physique varies more widely than Asiatics because of the variable nature of their climate.[5] The first half of Airs, Waters, Places contains a methodology for evaluating the health and character of a location on the basis of its environment, although the prescient Hippocrates does consider the inhabitants’ lifestyle is an influence on their health.[6] Factors influencing human health and character are the aspect of the habitat, its waters, the change in seasons and the rising and falling of planetary bodies. As an example, Hippocrates investigates the environment and character of the Scythians, whom he finds exhibit a particular character and physique due to the cold climate and barrenness of their homelands. Hippocrates then connects the barren environment of the Scythians with the impotence and barrenness of their men, although he maintains a grudgingly positive view of the martial skills of Scythian women.[7]

Despite the evidence for environmental determinism in Airs, Waters, Places, scholars argue that Hippocrates balanced the environment with the role of human institutions in shaping character and culture. Donald Lateiner argues that climate is not the sole cause of character or custom in Hippocrates and that human institutions play an important part in shaping society. As evidence, he refers to Hippocrates’ discussion of the “Longheads”, who elongated the skulls of their children through bandaging.[8] However, Lateiner’s view does not negate the impact of climate on society. Klaus Karttunen largely discredits Hippocrates’ Scythian determinism on the basis of his prejudice and lack of empiricism. He argues that Hippocrates had no interest in the nomadic steppe lifestyle of the Scythians, and he developed his theories using very limited evidence.[9] Karttunen may be correct that Hippocrates is prejudiced and unscientific, but that does not make Hippocrates’ assertions less determinist.

Whilst the determinism in Hippocrates is overt, the handling of nature or culture in Herodotus’ writing is subtler. Herodotus makes his most explicit connection between nature and culture when discussing the Egyptians, whom he regards as the “healthiest people in the world … because of the absence of changes in the climate”.[10] Elsewhere, Herodotus connects the differences between Egyptian customs and those of other races with the climate and the unusual behaviour of the Nile.[11] Moreover, Herodotus makes a striking connection between nature and culture when he has Cyrus articulate that “Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.”[12]

As with Hippocrates, scholars debate the degree of determinism in Herodotus. John Gould considers that Herodotus is more concerned with human agency than with the influence of the environment, and argues that he presents the question of nature or culture as one for his audience to evaluate. Gould provides as evidence Herodotus’ discussion of the toughness or softness of the Greeks and Persians, which Gould argues is balanced between the influence of the environment and that of culture.[13] Charles Chiasson generally concurs with Gould’s view that Herodotus balanced cultural and environmental influences, using Herodotus’ descriptions of Ionian climate and character as evidence.[14] Rosalind Thomas dismisses the determinism in Herodotus’ Egyptian analysis as either crude or implicitly wrong because it is inconsistent with other statements.[15] Thomas’ perspective on Herodotus’ determinism is unhelpfully selective, as she rejects those parts of Herodotus’ arguments that do not fit her analysis. She argues that valour, wisdom and law trump the poverty of the land as influences on Greek character in Herodotus’ thinking.[16] However, Thomas’ assertion can be inverted: it is arguable that the Greeks were driven to acquire valour, wisdom and law as cultural bolsters to offset the poverty of the land. Lateiner makes a similar point when he says “by valour, Greece wards off poverty and despotism”.[17]

Overall, there is a reasonable argument that Hippocrates is plainly and overtly determinist, despite the alternative views of the scholars considered here. Moreover, while Herodotus presents culture as a key factor in shaping human society, he also admits the fundamental role of the environment. In fact, the arguments of the ancient Greeks about the influence of the environment on human society were to echo down the centuries, as they formed the foundation of the racist determinism of Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple in the early twentieth century.

Racist determinism: Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple

 American geographers Huntington and Semple expressed a racist view that the physical and racial characteristics of a region were predictive of its economic and social success. That view has proven consequential, blighting the thinking of historians about nature or culture ever since. Writing in 1907, Huntington was concerned about the invasion of the United States by “the starving millions of China” and was at pains to demonstrate the climate-induced inferiority of the Asian races.[18] In 1922, Huntington continued the tradition of American exceptionalism when he argued that the climate of the eastern United States was optimal for productivity and other climates were inferior.[19] As a result, the inhabitants of those other lands shared the inferiority of their climate. To put Huntington’s work in context, he wrote during the era of European colonialism, when a competitive form of Darwinism was applied to international relations. For Huntington, those states endowed with natural resources and the “right” racial configuration and climate were at a significant advantage.[20] Huntington’s views were largely shared by Ellen Semple, who considered that race and environment were the primary influences on human history.[21] Semple studied the influence of the South African climate on its white inhabitants, and concluded that climate “has converted the urban merchant of Holland and the skilful Huguenot artisan of France into the crude pastoral Boer of the Transvaal.”[22]

Whilst the views of Huntington and Semple are distasteful to modern readers, they were influential at the time and continue to be so. Their modern influence is negative, as Huntington’s determinism is referenced time and again by modern historians as a reason for their unwillingness to address the nature or culture debate.[23] Climate historian Christian Pfister sums up the attitude of many of his colleagues when he says that the reluctance of historians to tackle climate history is “connected to their refusal of climatic determinism”.[24] Yet, as we shall see, avoidance of the nature or culture debate has created a larger problem than it has solved, by materially affecting the contribution of historians to climate science. That contribution has grown slowly since World War Two, with Annales historians forging a path for later scholars.

Interdisciplinary determinism: Annales historians

Since World War Two, historians have reached outside the cloister of their profession and made valuable contributions to interdisciplinary scholarship on nature or culture. In the vanguard of this movement were the Annales school of French historians who expanded historical inquiry to embrace the sciences, particularly social sciences and climatology.[25] The school was founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch and was influential in historical scholarship from the 1930s until the 1960s. In particular, Fernand Braudel and his student Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie explored the influence of climate on human history.

Braudel’s magnum opus on the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century broke new ground because he connected human history with geographical space.[26] He explored the influence of the Mediterranean environment on history, and in doing so, expanded historical scholarship beyond the treatment of nature as a passive backdrop to events.[27] In his analysis of Mediterranean history, Braudel may well have been the first significant modern historian to suggest the direct influence of climate on human history. He argued that the colder temperatures in the latter half of the sixteenth-century were one of the influences on the economic and social difficulties in the Mediterranean region at that time, although he recognised limitations in his data.[28] Braudel’s innovation was to write his history around three planes of time- geographic, social and individual time- with each plane representing a different timespan, from a single human life to thousands of years.[29] Braudel argued that climate impacted the longest plane, that of geographic time.[30] However, while he considered the impact of geography on history, Braudel concluded that, over longer periods, the human relationship with the environment was comprised of repeating cycles, and was close to timeless.[31]

That concept of stasis also consumed Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose key work on the climate of the last millennia was arguably the first history of climate in the modern era.[32] Le Roy Ladurie, like many others, blamed Huntington for the lack of climate history scholarship and so set out to write a “historian’s history of climate”.[33] His wariness of climatic explanations is evident in the almost polemical criticism of nature over culture as an explanation of historical events.[34] However, he was equally critical of the anthropocentric approach to history evident in the works of Bloch and others, thus his memorable perspective on mutilating historians. Le Roy Ladurie reproached Bloch for his lack of interest in sources which might demonstrate the influence of climate on human history, such as meteorological observations. He was equally critical of French medieval and modern historians who “shirked” climate history, and for whom nature was an unworthy subject.[35] Le Roy Ladurie then made a critical and prescient observation—that the relationship between climatic and human history remained to be described, because historians of his time lacked the tools and data to do so.[36] He called for a “geohistory” combining human and physical history which he described as “climatic history with a human face”, possibly in homage to Alexander Dubček.[37]

Despite his enthusiasm for nature over culture scholarship, Le Roy Ladurie was more cautious than Braudel in crediting climate with a material influence on history. He argued that the variation in temperature in recorded history was too small to overwhelm human agency although he left the question open for later research.[38] He concluded that the human consequences of climate were slight and difficult to detect.[39] Later scholars argue that Le Roy Ladurie’s reluctance to draw a connection between climate and human history remained a barrier to climate historians for several decades, although they recognise that the lack of climate history data was a genuine impediment.[40]

The open question of climate and history was taken up by the next generation of climate historians, of whom a leading figure is Christian Pfister. Pfister, writing from the 1970s to today, took up Le Roy Ladurie’s challenge of identifying data to build connections between climate and society. Pfister pioneered the use of historical records as proxy data for past climates. He also used the dates of Swiss wine grape harvests since the sixteenth century to recreate summer temperatures and agricultural yields.[41] In addition, Pfister used the historian’s archival research skills to identify sixteenth-century weather diaries, which contributed to the reconstruction of the early modern European climate.[42]

However, Pfister’s most significant contribution was to pioneer a role for historians in interdisciplinary climate research, due to his cooperation with geographers and climate scientists.[43] Given Pfister’s influence on nature or culture scholarship, his observation about the paucity of contributions by his fellow historians is telling. In typical quantitative style, Pfister identified that less than one percent of five hundred journal articles in a leading climate journal had addressed the influence of climate on past societies.[44] That paucity of contributions by historians, compared to the advances made by climate scientists, still remains an issue.

Neodeterminism

The nature or culture debate has come full circle with the neodeterminism of some climate scientists and historians in the era of anthropogenic climate change. That neodeterminism is associated with the rapid expansion of climate history data, which has overcome the problem of limited data identified by Le Roy Ladurie.[45] Modern science has developed a dizzying array of techniques for understanding past climates, from tree-rings to ice cores and from documentary evidence to analysis of pollen and single-cell organisms. Climate scientists have used this new data to analyse the impact of climate on past societies and neodeterminism has arisen from the ability to build statistically robust correlations between nature and culture. The irony is that scientists appear less sensitive than historians to the determinism of Huntington, and thus some climate science is an unwitting nod to an idea with a chequered past.[46] Examples of contemporary neodeterminism can be seen in the many quantitative studies of climate and society in leading academic journals.[47] An example of the neodeterministic style is this conclusion from a meta-analysis of forty-five different data sets in sixty different studies of climate and society:

Each 1-SD [standard deviation] change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall increases the frequency of interpersonal violence by 4% and intergroup conflict by 14%.[48]

Despite the scientific rigour and statistical robustness of modern climate science, critics identify a vital but missing element, one which provides the opportunity for historians to make a contribution. The new climate science views society as a black box, whereby a stimulus results in a predictable response. There is little attempt to open the black box and understand the workings of society which link the stimulus and response.[49] Joshua Howe argues that this lack of human insight derives from the scientific method, which precludes those moral and philosophical discourses so familiar to historians.[50] To illustrate Howe’s point, the authors of the paper quoted above did not investigate why violent conflict is correlated to temperature and rainfall. Their remit extended no further than describing the correlation. If the scientific method lacks human insight, then historians have the opportunity to use their skills to articulate the links between climatic stimulus and human response. Those skills include the use of archival evidence, and the ability to translate that evidence into a comprehensible narrative.[51]

Inevitably, there are risks in interdisciplinary study. Sahlins argues that such study is fraught because it multiplies the uncertainties of one discipline by the uncertainties of another.[52] In addition, the terrain of interdisciplinary study is difficult because the scientific approach of climate science differs from the humanist approach of historical scholarship. For example, climate scientists may prefer to study timeframes of centuries or millennia to ensure a statistically robust analysis, whereas historians may be more comfortable with examining decades or years.

Despite the difficulties, some historians have grasped the nettle of interdisciplinary climate scholarship. Deepak Chakrabarty has written persuasively about the relationship between historical scholarship and climate science. He argues that anthropogenic climate change collapses the distinction between human and natural history and that humans have moved from being biological agents to having geological agency. As geological agents, humans have the power to alter planetary forces in a manner which caused mass extinctions in the past.[53] This may produce a new and inverted form of determinism, in which scholars study the human impact on the climate, rather than the reverse.[54] Chakrabarty’s arguments convey a determinist perspective, using the non-pejorative and reasoned definition of the term expressed in this article. Similarly, Mark Carey, in reviewing climate historiography, has called for interdisciplinary research into how social relations, power dynamics and ideas affect societal responses to climate change.[55] Carey’s views of historical climatology are determinist in that he concludes that “climate never acts alone …” although he recognizes that distinguishing climate from other effects can be difficult.[56] Christian Pfister has continued to urge historians to become active in climate history. Pfister shares the reasoned determinism of his colleagues, but his arguments for climate impact reflect his interest in the effects of short-term weather events as much as climate change.[57] Richard Hoffman rejects the view that the non-human world is the domain of science alone. He argues for a hybrid view of nature and culture in which human society is an amalgam of the symbolic and material worlds.[58] John Brook has investigated how the earth’s history has shaped human history and has challenged historians to shed their fear of the determinist label and incorporate the new climate data in their work.[59] Most recently, a group of historians, climate scientists and archaeologists expanded the Annales interdisciplinary model in their investigation of the medieval Anatolian climate and its impact on human history.[60] For all that progress, the historians discussed here are united by their call for greater cooperation with other disciplines, because of the urgency and importance of understanding the impact of anthropogenic climate change.

Conclusion

This article has considered the long and occasionally chequered historiography of the debate about the influence of the environment, specifically climate, on human history. The debate has now come full circle, with today’s neodeterminism owing more than a little to the influence of Hippocrates, Herodotus and Huntington. Unfortunately, the racism of Ellsworth Huntington has cast a long shadow over contemporary historiography, making the reasoned use of the term determinism still difficult. Yet despite this troubled legacy, modern climate science has proven what Hippocrates, Herodotus and Le Roy Ladurie could only speculate on: that climate and society are inexorably linked. However, modern climate science lacks insight into the workings of society and a means to decode the black box of human relationships. Some contemporary historians are contributing to that decoding by using the skills of their profession in an interdisciplinary environment. Universally, those historians have called for more of their colleagues to join them. Reflecting that call, this article considers that interdisciplinary study of climate and society is a better fate than being mutilated by the study of humanity alone.

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[1] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 20.

[2] Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Articles in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 92-93.

[3] For the use of the term “neodeterminism” by scholars from a range of disciplines, see G.H. Dury, “Neocatastrophism? A Further Look,” Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 4, No. 3 (1980); Antoinette M. Mannion, “Guest Comment: The New Environmental Determinism,” Environmental Conservation 21, No. 1 (1994); James Rodger Fleming, “Climate, History, Society, Culture: An Editorial Essay,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 1, No. 4 (2010); Guy D. Middleton, “Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies,” Journal of Archaeological Research 20, No. 3 (2012).

[4] Scholars debate the authorship of the works of Hippocrates and some refer to “the Hippocratic author”. As the identity of the author is less important than the content of his work here, authorship is credited to Hippocrates.

[5] Hippocrates, “Airs, Waters, Places,” in Hippocrates Volume 1. Trans. W. H. S. Jones and E. T. Withington. (London: Heinemann, 1923), 12,16.

[6] Hippocrates, “Airs, Waters, Places,” 1-11.

[7] Hippocrates, “Airs, Waters, Places,” 17-23.

[8] Donald Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 158.

[9] Klaus Karttunen, “The Ethnography of the Fringes,” in Brills Companion to Herodotus (Brill, 2002), 445-46.

[10] Herodotus, The Histories, Ed. and trans. Aubrey De Sélincourt and John Marincola. (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 2.77.

[11] Herodotus, The Histories, 2.35.

[12] Herodotus, The Histories, 9.122.

[13] John Gould, Herodotus (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 60.

[14] Charles Chiasson, “Scythian Androgyny and Environmental Determinism in Herodotus and the Hippocratic Πϵρὶ Ἀϵ́Ρων Ὑδάτων Τóπων,” Syllecta Classica 12, No. 1 (2001): 59-60.

[15] Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and the Art of Persuasion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112.

[16] Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 109-10.

[17] Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus, 160.

[18] Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, a Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the Geographic Basis of History (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1907), 5.

[19] Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1922), 9.

[20] Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde, The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 120.

[21] Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Operation of Geographic Factors in History,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 41, No. 7 (1909): 423-24.

[22] Ellen Semple, “Influences of Geographic Environment, on the Basis of Ratzel’s Systems of Anthropo-Geography,” (New York: Holt, 1911), 623.

[23] Rudolf BráZdil et al., “Historical Climatology in Europe – the State of the Art,” Climatic Change 70, no. 3 (2005): 369; Joshua P. Howe, “History and Climate: A Road Map to Humanistic Scholarship on Climate Change,” Climatic Change 105, No. 1 (2011): 358; M.J. Ingram, G.Farmer, T.M.L. Wrigley, “Introduction,” in Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man ed. T. M. L. Wigley, M. J. Ingram, and G. Farmer (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18; Le Roy Ladurie Times of Feast, Times of Famine, 7,14,24; Christian Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies to Climatic Variation: A New Focus for Historical Climatology in the Twenty-First Century,” Climatic Change 100, No. 1 (2010); 28; Robin, Sörlin, and Warde The Future of Nature, 119-20.

[24] Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies to Climatic Variation,” 28; BráZdil et al., “Historical Climatology in Europe,” 402.

[25] Eamon O’Flaherty, “Annales School” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences 2nd ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 708.

[26] Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 17.

[27] Braudel, The Mediterranean, 19-20.

[28] Braudel, The Mediterranean, 272-75; Ingram, Farmer and Wigley, introduction to Climate and History, 32.

[29] Braudel, The Mediterranean, 20.

[30] Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies,” 26

[31] Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies,” 20; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, No. 2 (2009): 205.

[32] Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast.

[33] Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, 22.

[34] Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, 8-17.

[35] Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, 18-20.

[36] Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, 22; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Ben Reynolds, and Sian Reynolds, The Territory of the Historian (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), 295.

[37] Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, 22. Alexander Dubcek was leader of the 1968 Prague Spring revolution in Czechoslovakia. He coined the phrase “socialism with a human face” for his political ideology.

[38] Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, 292-93.

[39] Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies,” 27.

[40] John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, Studies in Environment and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2.

[41] Christian Pfister, “An Analysis of the Little Ice Age Climate in Switzerland and Its Consequences for Agricultural Production,” in Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 214-18.

[42] Christian Pfister et al., “Daily Weather Observations in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” Climatic Change 43, No. 1 (1999): 111-50.

[43] Christian Pfister and Rudolf Brázdil, “Climatic Variability in Sixteenth-Century Europe and Its Social Dimension: A Synthesis,” ibid.: 5-53.

[44] Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies,” 26.

[45] Brooke, Climate Change, 2.

[46] BráZdil et al., “Historical Climatology in Europe,” 370.

[47] Solomon M. Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel, “Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,” Science (New York) 341, No. 6151 (2013); David D. Zhang et al., “Global Climate Change, War, and Population Decline in Recent Human History,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, No. 49 (2007); David D. Zhang et al., “The Causality Analysis of Climate Change and Large-Scale Human Crisis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108, No. 42 (2011).

[48] Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel, “Quantifying the Influence of Climate,” 1211.

[49] Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies,” 28.

[50] Joshua P. Howe, “History and Climate: A Road Map to Humanistic Scholarship on Climate Change,” Climatic Change 105 (2011): 362.

[51] Howe, “History and Climate,” 362.

[52] M.Sahlins (1972) Stone Age Economics in Dena Ferran Dincauze, Environmental Archaeology: Principles and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23.

[53] Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 201-07.

[54] The concept of inverted determinism was proposed by Professor Julia Kindt, University of Sydney, in April 2017 and presents an opportunity for further study.

[55] Howe, “History and Climate,” 242.

[56] Mark Carey, “Climate and History: A Critical Review of Historical Climatology and Climate Change Historiography,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 3, No. 3 (2012): 236.

[57] Pfister, “The Vulnerability of Past Societies,” 29.

[58] Richard C Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 8.

[59] Brooke, Climate Change, 1-2.

[60] John Haldon et al., “The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, History, and Archaeology,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45, No. 2 (2014).