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The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian Fagan Basic Books, 2003 304 pp., $15, paper 
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History by David Christian Univ. of California Press, 2004 642 pp., $19.95, paper |
My parents' library was not exactly well stocked, unless sentimental devotional literature was your fancy. But below the Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedia (purchased in weekly installments at the grocery store) was a thick book that captivated me as a young boy: H.G. Wells' The Outline of History. There it all was: the history of everything, so it seemed. Learn that, and you've mastered history!
Universal history, the grand project of a single overarching story of the past, appealed both to my curiosity and to an untutored conviction that the past had to be a story full of meaning. As I became better acquainted with the methods and practices of academic historians, I realized that my childhood fascination with universal history was at best naïve. Not only does universal history lie beyond the grasp of the historian's method, it is also beyond the historian's appointed task. Because the past has no shape other than what we impose on it, I learned that no reputable historian should presume to write such a speculative story. Still, I would on occasion pause to peruse the impressive multi-volume works by Toynbee and the Durants and privately marvel at the boldness of their vision; could it be that universal history was not such an intellectually bankrupt enterprise as I had been taught to believe?
In recent years some of the impulses behind universal history seem to be undergoing rehabilitation. In part in response to globalization, historians are scrambling to find the conceptual tools (units of investigation, periodization schemes, etc.) to make better sense of humanity's past. This is an extraordinary intellectual development still very much in its initial stages. What is already clear is that historians and scholars from other disciplines, particularly the natural sciences, are asking questions that force us to examine the past in very large chunks.
Indeed, what makes this venture more respectable than the old universal history is an increasingly sophisticated set of tools borrowed from the sciences. One of the most fruitful uses of the new scientific evidence is in the exploration of how climate and environmental factors have influenced history. As was the case with universal history, for decades historians were suspicious of anything that smacked of environmental determinism, especially since early practitioners of this approach—viz., Ellsworth Huntington, whose Civilization and Climate (1924) created a hierarchy of civilizations based upon climactic advantage or disadvantage—came dangerously close to racist conclusions. But many of these suspicions melted away with the enormous success of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) and his current bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Also notable in establishing the new universal history were Brian Fagan's Flood, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (1996) and The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (2000). Now Fagan has completed a "climate and history" trilogy with his most ambitious offering to date: The Long Summer. Drawing from an impressive array of studies (from standard archaeological finds and tree ring analyses to deep ice core samples, the study of pollen grains (palynology), and amazing forensic techniques that one might expect to see on an episode of CSI, Fagan assesses the impact of various climatic shifts on the long sweep of history.
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