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List of contents
Introduction: growth, punctuation, and human well-being; Part I. Evolution and Earth Systems: 1. The court jester on the platform of life; 2. Human emergences; Part II. Domestication, Agriculture, and the Rise of the State: 3. Agricultural revolutions; 4. The Mid-Holocene and the urban-state revolution; 5. Human well-being from the Pleistocene to the rise of the state; Part III. Ancient and Medieval Agrarian Societies: 6. Stasis and growth in the epoch of agrarian empires; 7. Optimum and crisis in early civilization, 3000-500 BC; 8. A global antiquity, 500 BC-AD 542; 9. The global dark and middle ages, AD 542-AD 1350; Part IV. Into the Modern Condition: 10. Climate, demography, economy, and polity in the late medieval-early modern world, 1350-1700; 11. Global transformations: atlantic origins, 1700-1870; 12. Launching modern growth: 1870 to 1945; 13. Growth beyond limits: 1945 to present; Coda. A rough journey into an uncertain future.
About the author
John L. Brooke is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University, where he also directs the Center for Historical Research. His books include Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010), which won the Best Book Prize from the Society of the Historians of the Early American Republic; The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Cambridge, 1994), which won the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians; and The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge, 1989), which won the Bancroft Prize for American History. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society and the Harvard Charles Warren Center.
Summary
Climate Change and the Course of Global History presents the first global study by a historian to fully integrate the earth-system approach of the new climate science with the material history of humanity. Starting with the role of environmental change in biological and human evolution, the book uses the results of three decades of climate science to present a new understanding of human history.
