No abstract
In 2005, the international reinsurance company Munich Re became one of the earliest to offer their corporate and institutional clients protection against the risks resulting from climate change. Notwithstanding political controversy about the scientific consensus on global warming, reinsurers (i.e., insurers of insurance companies) have been making use of climate science, combining it with actuarial science to calculate the short-, medium-, and long-range liabilities of extreme weather in the future. With these looming threats in mind, Geoffrey Parker looks backwards in this panoramic history, but takes a similar approach to analyzing natural and human disasters by drawing on the environmental sciences. Over twenty-two chapters divided into five sections, Parker methodically integrates the "natural archive" (xvi) of material evidence derived from historical climatology (e.g., ice core samples, tree-ring data, volcanic deposits) with the "human archive" (xvii) of more traditional primary sources (official records, diaries, publications, paintings, archaeology), focusing on the anomalous weather of the seventeenth century, mainly across Europe and Asia. During the Little Ice Age, which lasted between roughly 1250 and 1850, glaciers around the North Pole expanded and caused unusually severe weather around the globe. Some of the worst and best-documented conditions occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, which experienced a stretch of exceptionally cold weather from the 1640s through 1690s. Parker examines how societies throughout the world responded-or, more often, failed to respond adequatelyto changing climatic conditions. He argues that Europe's "General Crisis" was a global phenomenon influenced by the direct and indirect consequences of bad weather: poor harvests, dearth, famine, drought, fire, epidemic disease, economic and demographic decline, social unrest, revolts, and ongoing war. While pointing to the frequently crucial role of climate and weather in exacerbating these problems, Parker emphatically rejects environmental determinism. Instead, he attributes the crises to what he repeatedly calls a "fatal synergy" (xxii-xxix) between climatic change and the intransigence of most ruling elites, which together intensified destruction, violence, and suffering. In his judgment, authoritarian Tokugawa Japan was the exception, the only early modern state to "get it right" (the title of chapter 16 is "Getting It Right") by taking effective measures to invest in infrastructure and avoid foreign conflicts. Parker notes that the "dark continents" of the Americas, Africa, and Australia did not experience the global crisis in the same ways, or at least not in ways that he was able to recover using the same methodology. Readers of this journal are likely to be particularly interested in Parker's treatment of the General Crisis and the Thirty Years' War, including Parker's reassessment of his own previous work on these topics. In chapters 8 and 19, weather and climate are loosely correlated with key historical moments. The D...
and the United States to present and discuss their work on the history of various aspects of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge production, including cartography, astrology, shipbuilding, natural history, medicine, and public health. Several invited senior scholars, whose research interests resonated with those of the participants, offered commentary, suggestions, and probing questions. Lively debates ensued concerning the similarities and differences of the various geopolitical Atlantics, as well as the epistemological and methodological implications of looking at the history of science and medicine from an Atlantic perspective. Although most of us had arrived at Harvard prepared to discuss the role of the Americas in ''the advancement of European science and medicine,'' a great deal of what we did actually served to challenge the assumptions implicit in the seminar's title. We came to be far more interested in understanding how transatlantic interactions shaped and were shaped by processes of knowledge production, and we became fascinated by the implications of using the Atlantic as a unit of analysis in the history of science, medicine, and technology. As a result, much of our discussion focused on recent models developed by scholars in Atlantic history could recast the received narratives of the history of science and medicine � an enterprise we might call an Atlantic history of science. 2 Equally intriguing for us, however, was the notion of a history of Atlantic science: rather than importing a methodology from Atlantic history, we felt we could create a new series of questions by redefining what knowledge was in the first place and questioning the circumstances of its production. For the purposes of this review essay, which seeks to capture the spirit of those early conversations in Cambridge, we propose calling the assemblages and interac tions of the peoples, objects, institutions, and techniques that resulted in and from colonization during the early modern period ''Atlantic science.'' We recognize, of
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