Abstract
It is nearly 50 years since Professor of Geography at Bedford College, London, Gordon Manley, reflected upon ‘The revival of climatic determinism.’ His paper, which appeared in the Geographical Review, was spurred by Gustav Utterstrom’s work on ‘Climatic fluctuations and population problems in Early Modern Europe.’ For an Economic Historian accustomed to taking into account the multifarious factors that could influence human well-being, Utterstrom’s focus on the role of climate was, in Manley’s eyes, important. It has been suggested that, with the exception of the French Annales School, Historians had hitherto been somewhat indifferent towards studying the impacts of climatic change on society.1 Utterstrom’s was a radical argument to make within the field of Economic History at the time. Yet it was also controversial for the Geographical community, whose science had arguably fallen ‘on hard times’ in the stagnating wake of some of the extreme views of environmental and climatic determinism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century.2 Utterstrom’s work, though later criticised,3 would in fact figure among a trenche of more nuanced climate histories, which, eschewing generalisations about the significance of climate in world history, did nevertheless highlight the importance of climatic factors for societies. Theirs, however, was a more tempered and redefined climatic determinism.4
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Endfield, G. (2009). Reconsidering Climate and Causality: Case Studies from Colonial Mexico. In: Sörlin, S., Warde, P. (eds) Nature’s End. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245099_13
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