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A Temperate Empire

Making Climate Change in Early America

Anya Zilberstein author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:24th Nov '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

A Temperate Empire cover

Most people assume that climate change is recent news. A Temperate Empire shows that we have been debating the science and politics of climate change for a long time, since before the age of industrialization. Focusing on attempts to transform New England and Nova Scotia's environment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book explores the ways that early Americans studied and tried to remake local climates according to their plans for colonial settlement and economic development. For colonial officials, landowners, naturalists and other local elites, New England and Nova Scotia's frigid, long winters and short, muggy summers were persistent sources of anxiety. They became intensely interested in understanding the natural history of the climate and, ultimately, in reducing their vulnerability to it. In the short term, European migrants from other northern countries would welcome the cold or, as one Loyalist from New Hampshire argued, the cold would moderate the supposedly fiery temperaments of Jamaicans deported to colonial Nova Scotia. Over the long term, however, the expansion of colonial farms was increasingly tempering the climate itself. A naturalist in Vermont agreed with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson when he insisted that every cultivated part of America was already "more temperate, uniform, and equal" than before colonization--a forecast of permanent, global warming they all wholeheartedly welcomed. By pointing to such ironies, A Temperate Empire emphasizes the necessarily historical nature of the climate and of our knowledge about it.

A Temperate Empire deserves the immediate attention of historians as a genuine-and highly successful-exercise in recovering historical origins of our climatological citizenship. * Vladimir Jankovic, author of Reading the Skies (Chicago, 2000) and Confronting the Climate (Palgrave, 2010), ISIS *
The lessons of this book are many and its deep history crackles with resonances in the present. * Adam Bobbette, The Times Literary Supplement *
Anya Zilberstein has offered an extraordinarily sensitive and textured treatment of the early modern discussion of climate and climate change in A Temperate Empire. She successfully combines the history of science and environmental history to provide an account that is relevant both to modern-day discussions about climate change and to early American environmental history ... Zilberstein's book is beautifully written and enjoyable, as well as rigorous and insightful. * James Bergman, H-Net *
Why would anyone emigrate to North America in the seventeenth century? Anya Zilberstein complicates our understanding in ... a short exploration of contemporary debates regarding the nature of North American climate and the question of how European and African peoples would adapt to life in the Americas ... A Temperate Empire is a useful contribution to our knowledge of how educated men struggled to make sense of American weather as global empire undermined ancient theory ... Succeeds as a contribution to the wider literature on early modern empire and the fitful rise of science. * John L. Brooke, American Historical Review *

ISBN: 9780190206598

Dimensions: 157mm x 241mm x 28mm

Weight: 544g

280 pages