Introduction: growth, punctuation, and human well-being; Part I. Evolution and Earth Systems: 1. The court jester on the platform of life; 2. Human emergences; Part II. Domestication, Agriculture, and the Rise of the State: 3. Agricultural revolutions; 4. The Mid-Holocene and the urban-state revolution; 5. Human well-being from the Pleistocene to the rise of the state; Part III. Ancient and Medieval Agrarian Societies: 6. Stasis and growth in the epoch of agrarian empires; 7. Optimum and crisis in early civilization, 3000–500 BC; 8. A global antiquity, 500 BC–AD 542; 9. The global dark and middle ages, AD 542–AD 1350; Part IV. Into the Modern Condition: 10. Climate, demography, economy, and polity in the late medieval-early modern world, 1350–1700; 11. Global transformations: atlantic origins, 1700–1870; 12. Launching modern growth: 1870 to 1945; 13. Growth beyond limits: 1945 to present; Coda. A rough journey into an uncertain future.
The first global study by a historian to fully integrate the earth-system approach of the new climate science with the material history of humanity.
John L. Brooke is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University, where he also directs the Center for Historical Research. His books include Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010), which won the Best Book Prize from the Society of the Historians of the Early American Republic; The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Cambridge, 1994), which won the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians; and The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge, 1989), which won the Bancroft Prize for American History. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society and the Harvard Charles Warren Center.
'Think of this as travel writing of the highest order. A rough
journey for mankind becomes a stimulating armchair adventure for
the reader. This is big history, framed by big ideas but anchored
in the very recent explosion of knowledge about climate through the
ages and about our history and prehistory. Brooke skillfully
navigates the interpretive hazards of proxy paleoclimate data. In
Brooke's persuasive account, our evolution to modernity is not
absolutely determined by climate and disease, but it has been
substantially influenced by them. Our new knowledge shows that
quite often these influences abruptly change course, and Brooke
shows that much of our history is a consequence of societies
scrambling to adjust.' Mark A. Cane, G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of
Earth and Climate Sciences, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,
Columbia University
'John Brooke skillfully joins a vast scientific literature to the
historiography of virtually every major region to argue that
climatic shifts always have been the primary agency determining the
pace and direction of human development. He thus offers an
unprecedentedly coordinated global chronology as well as a nuanced,
distinctly original understanding of the relation between
endogenous and exogenous forces. A jaw-dropping tour de force.'
Victor Lieberman, Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished University
Professor of History, University of Michigan
'Readers with advanced degrees in meteorology, archaeology,
economics and world environmental history will easily comprehend
Brooke's magisterial survey-synthesis. For others, it poses an
interesting challenge. The author's mastery and referencing of the
vast technical literature in different disciplines is remarkable. …
The author also explains seven phases of climate history since 3000
BCE and three industrial revolutions. The consequence is a
fundamental change from a lightly populated world controlled by
nature to a heavily populated world controlled by both nature and
human agency. Summing up: highly recommended.' F. N. Egerton,
Choice
'… a wide-ranging work starting with our pre-human and early human
ancestor and ending with a consideration of future trajectories …
One of the reviews on the back cover has called it 'a jaw-dropping
tour de force'; spanning, as it does, millennia and continents, it
is hard to argue with that conclusion.' Carleton Jones, The Journal
of Irish Archaeology
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