In The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea, David N. Livingstone examines the history of climate determinism, seeking to place contemporary environmental anxieties and apocalyptic visions of “nature’s revenge” in the Anthropocene into their long historical context. Taking its title from Montesquieu’s eighteenth-century invocation of the power of climate to shape human affairs—for which religious authorities subsequently censured him—Livingstone follows the pervasive, tentacular growth of ideas about the individual, national, and world-historical influence of climate on nearly every area of human existence. In doing so, the book travels far beyond the domains that even Montesquieu might have imagined.
Livingstone organizes his tour of environmental determinism along four thematic axes, which make up the main subdivisions of the book: health, mind, wealth, and war. In the first section, Livingstone describes the long-lasting influence of Hippocratic thinking about airs and climates and their influence on the human body, tracing this intellectual thread through the work of seventeenth-century English physician Thomas Sydenham and the growing field of medical geography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nowhere was climate anxiety more marked than in the growing ambit of European empires, where the birth of the field of tropical medicine in the nineteenth century was heavily shaped, Livingstone argues, by concerns about the negative effects of tropical climates and terrains on newly arrived white European bodies, who either could not, or should not, become acclimated to the new territory they had been sent to cultivate, dominate, and rule. One outcome was the development of hill stations, where Europeans could retreat during the hot season; another was the rise of a discourse about the moral as well as physical peril represented by tropical regions—a series of beliefs which presented a significant challenge to be overcome if the European empire in the tropics was to persist in the long term.
Climate logic also figured in the early twentieth-century flourishing of eugenic immigration policy (chapter 4), in narratives of human evolution concerning the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the rise of Homo sapiens (chapter 5), and in ideas about mass psychology, mental illness, and human aggression (chapter 6). Climate determinism, too, has established a foothold in theories of economic development, wealth, and global inequality, a mode of thinking that Livingstone traces back to thinkers as early and influential as Ibn Khaldūn, Montesquieu, and the influential nineteenth-century geographer Friedrich Ratzel. Even more pervasive, however, was the place of zonal philosophies of labor and human development in justifications for American chattel slavery and the colonial expropriation of land and labor. If the idea that the “wealth of nations” was conditioned in some way by climatic factors once sounded reasonable enough, Livingstone shows just how tenuous those claims actually were, and frequently how deeply rooted in overt racism. Turning toward the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries in the later chapters, Livingstone shifts modes from the explanatory to the diagnostic, tracing the perpetuation of zonal theories of economic performance, climatological explanations for the outbreak of wars, and the growing tendency of nations to frame climate change as a national security concern. What might seem like very new concerns about accelerating drought and intensifying heat on civil violence or GDP are instead shown to be very old ideas indeed, and ones that show a remarkable consistency in their checkered intellectual paths, even when those continuities go unacknowledged or unrecognized by their current adherents.
Like a many-headed hydra, no sooner has one head of environmental determinism been lopped off, it seems, than four others appear in its place. In fact, Livingstone’s account shows that those replacement hydra heads are often remarkably similar to those previously vanquished. Ideas about the influence of certain climates on mental acuity and intelligence, for instance, appear with astonishing intellectual consistency at intervals across the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries in discourses that range from Enlightenment racial theory to modern paleoanthropology. In turn, Hippocratic thinking turns out to hold a surprising relevance for contemporary experts prognosticating about the future impact of the climate crisis on war, migration, and civil conflict in the rest of the twenty-first century. In some cases, these intellectual lineages are explicitly acknowledged, with chains of citation or older thinkers being exhumed, often triumphantly, by a determinist thinker of a subsequent generation with a new audience and a bone to pick. In others, the connections are more tenuous but often still quite striking—in Livingstone’s account, there seems to be fairly little in present-day thinking about the “empire of climate” that is new under the (harsh, enervating, and likely deleterious) sun.
The Empire of Climate is organized as a high-level overview of the varied history of a very large idea. For readers already versed in the longer intellectual history of the environmental sciences, there will be a number of familiar figures, from Hippocrates and Patrick Manson to Ellsworth Huntington and Jared Diamond. But even for the scholarly expert reader, there are many figures who are relatively underexplored in the existing literature (or rarely considered in the context of their environmental determinism) or are entirely unknown. Virtually every topic Livingstone discusses could be the subject of an entire monograph on its own; in instances where this work has already been done, Livingstone is generous and explicit with his references to other scholars’ work. Given the scope of the history, some figures (and some chapters) will hold more interest for individual readers than others. And yet a key element of Livingstone’s argument is the necessity of showing how these topics, often treated only individually or in thematic isolation, actually have an enormous amount of overlap and interconnection, and the sheer volume of examples provides the ballast for a quite damning account of the many intellectual and moral weaknesses of deterministic thinking. In other words, Livingstone is less interested in writing a deep history of specifically environmental determinism and imperialism or the long and checkered history of meteorological medicine than he is in showing how the same preoccupations, assumptions, and fatalistic denial of human agency recur over and over again, even in areas of human endeavor that would seem to be fairly far apart.
Exploring the intellectual history of “the empire of climate” necessarily means that Livingstone is engaged in writing a big-picture synthesis of a large number of texts, which are themselves often big-picture syntheses or discourses a couple of degrees removed from their supporting empirical evidence. This evidence, in turn, is often shown to be cherry-picked, critically limited, or even nonexistent. At times, the narrative starts to blur together—text after text, thinker after thinker, all of them worrying the same set of sorry preoccupations. Many of the most compelling sections in the latter half of the book come when Livingstone discusses the occasions where empirical studies were developed to test hypotheses about climate’s deterministic human impact and frequently returned results that pointed instead to the persistent and much more marked influence of ordinary human activities: political marginalization, social fragmentation, and economic turmoil. There is a fascinating counter-history of anti-determinism that becomes more and more apparent as the book progresses, although it always remains outside the main ambit of Livingstone’s account. And yet, if we are to follow Livingstone’s call in the concluding chapter to recognize climate determinism as a hothouse of “fatalism and fanaticism” that reveals “how crippling a force it can be on human agency, equality, and empowerment” (p. 412) having more examples of how researchers, commentators, and skeptical publics have questioned and successfully rejected the allure of determinism would provide some useful texture and context. As Livingstone shows, many people have fallen for climatic determinism’s seductive trap, even as he gives an exhaustive accounting of just how fatalistic, slipshod, and poorly evidenced much of that work was and is.
