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Zusatztext “Zilberstein's book is a welcome addition to current debates on climate change. By doing painstaking work on varying facets of how colonists and Europeans understood the climate and their ability to change it toward their own ends, Zilberstein has proven these historical actors had climate and humanity's ability to change it near the center of colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of course, the logic of agricultural improvers, that climate change can be achieved through increasing population and controlling an ever-increasing amount of land in rationalized and prescribed ways, turned out to be the greatest irony for these intellectuals. It may have been a goal to achieve climate change, but it was fundamentally intertwined with colonialism in a fundamental. As it turns out, the improvers were right. Humans can induce climate change.” Andrew Johnson, Cultures of Energy blog Informationen zum Autor Anya Zilberstein is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. Klappentext Controversy over the role of human activity in causing climate change is pervasive in contemporary society. But, as Anya Zilberstein shows in this work, debates about the politics and science of climate are nothing new. Indeed, they began as early as the settlement of English colonists in North America, well before the age of industrialization.In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many early Americans believed that human activity and population growth were essential to moderating the harsh extremes of cold and heat in the New World. In the preindustrial British settler colonies in particular, it was believed that the right kinds of people were agents of climate warming and that this was a positive and deliberate goal of industrious activity, rather than an unintended and lamentable side effect of development. A Temperate Empire explores the ways that colonists studied and tried to remake local climates in New England and Nova Scotia according to their plans for settlement and economic growth. For colonial officials, landowners, naturalists, and other elites, the frigid, long winters and short, muggy summers were persistent sources of anxiety. These early Americans became intensely interested in reimagining and reducing their vulnerability to the climate. Linking climate to race, they assured would-be migrants that hardy Europeans were already habituated to the severe northern weather and Caribbean migrants' temperaments would be improved by it. Even more, they drew on a widespread understanding of a reciprocal relationship between a mild climate and the prosperity of empire, promoting the notion that land cultivation and the expansion of colonial farms would increasingly moderate the climate. One eighteenth-century naturalist observed that European settlement and industry had already brought about a "more temperate, uniform, and equal" climate worldwide-a forecast of a permanent, global warming that was wholeheartedly welcomed.Illuminating scientific arguments that once celebrated the impact of economic activities on environmental change, A Temperate Empire showcases an imperial, colonial, and early American history of climate change. Zusammenfassung A Temperate Empire explores how early North American settlers understood the widespread process of climate warming and tried to remake local climates through colonial settlement and economic development. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments Introduction - Improving the Climate Part I: Climate and Geography Chapter 1 - The Golden Mean Chapter 2 - Transatlantic Networks and the Geography of Climate Knowledge Part II: Climate and Colonialism Chapter 3 - An American Siberia Chapter 4 - Jamaicans In and Out of Nova Scotia Chapter 5 - A Work in Progress Notes Bibliography Index ...
