Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Cen Hardcover – Illustrated, 26 February 2019

The Little Ice Age spanned from around 1300 until the year 1800. Blom`s book period starts around 1570. In fact, most of the book has nothing do with the Little Ice Age. The book spotlights the social upheavals taking place during this period. Society starts out bounded by the Catholic Church. Poor crop harvests resulting from cold and rainy summers, lead to mass witch burnings. But slowly the roots of The Enlightenment are taking hold. New approaches to agriculture, send large peasant populations into developing cities. This, in turn, provides a cheap labour force for newly developing factories. Trade is opening markets all over the world. Blom outlines new philosophical contributions from; Spinoza, Bayle, and Voltaire. The Reformation is also transforming religion. And most important of all, the seeds of democracy are slowly replacing the elite ruling class. Most readers will thoroughly enjoy Blom`s review of this time period. Did it have much to do with the Little Ice Age? No, not really. Unfortunately, the book ends on a terrible note. Blom kicks off on anti-capitalism global warming rant. He insists on a "scientific approach" to economic management, which will save the planet from global warming. Well, the scientific approach to economics was attempted in the former Soviet Union. The Soviet results speak for themselves. Useful idiots will, of course, agree with Blom on this one. And the jury is still out in regards to the global warming religious movement. In the 1970s, a return of The Ice Age was the big trend. The history of mass social manias urges us to maintain some skepticism.The bottom line. This was an insightful look into the European Enlightenment. And the book had very little to do with The Little Ice Age.

Philipp Blom's history of the Little Ice Age of the long seventeenth century is a masterwork illuminating innumerable interconnections. I was an AP World History teacher for a decade, and Blom's insights and skill at depicting the links between climate change and economic and philosophical developments almost inspire me to want to go back into the classroom.The Little Ice Age is a well recognized period of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, beginning around 1300 and lasting until about 1800. Blom's focus is on the most severe period, from 1570 to the early eighteenth century. There are many theories but no universally recognized cause for the Little Ice Age, but its effects are well known and indisputable. Blom acknowledges that the impact of the Little Ice Age was felt around the planet, but he chooses to focus on Europe in order to take advantage of the many written records to be found there.Nature's Mutiny is made up of three large sections broken into a series of shorter, but fascinating, examinations of such varied subjects as the rise of Amsterdam as a trading center, the growth of Enlightenment thought, changes in military hardware and fighting techniques, the philosophies of Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire, and others, the rise and decline of the Sabbatai Zevi cult, and many more vignettes. Blom explains how all of these are interconnected and traceable to the weather changes which reshaped the culture and subsequent history of seventeenth century Europe.I found Blom to be a fascinating and challenging author throughout Nature's Mutiny. Perhaps the most intriguing section is his Epilogue, in which he discusses the ways human societies had to adapt as the weather and climate shifted, then draws implications for twenty-first century societies facing similar challenges. Nature's Mutiny is an important study which needs to be given serious attention. Brian Fagan's earlier work The Little Ice Age, as well as his The Long Summer and Floods, Famines, and Emperors, provide more insights into historical climate change.

The back cover of this book makes the claim that "a few degrees of climate change can alter the course of civilization" . Maybe, but this text does not deliver. It describes many of the key ideas that affected politics and economics in the 17th century for sure, and has an extensive bibliography, but the link with climate is weak. The link with geography is particularly tenuous - early on, it claims the Spanish Armada in 1588 anchored in "English waters", a singular claim for Calais (where every other source states it was anchored) and later sailed north "toward Norway" - worth looking at a globe on that one. And so it goes on. The author clearly has just not read up on climatology, dismissing the Maunder Minimum, for example, in a few lines, with no indication of the interactions between solar radiation and the atmosphere. The book could just as easily have been entitled "How literacy and printing transformed the West" or "How colonisation of the Americas transformed the West". The author clearly knows his 17th century intellectuals, but has not got far beyond that comfort zone. Hard not to sum up as "could do better".

pleased

A very good read- informative without being too didactic although it has interesting warnings for our times. I find it fascinating that in the past humans ascribed weather issues to theological actors but didn't deny the weather changes; today theology has been put aside but so many happily dismiss evidence of the changes and their causes.A very worthwhile read