Climate changes are often mentioned in history books as impacting human societies around the world. E.g., Little Ice Age, some desert not being a desert during this period, some region dried up during this period prompting immigration, etc.
So I thought having a comprehensive book on the topic should be nice. I am particularly interested in Europe, North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and China. Hopefully with maps showing the climate change region-by-region. Online sources too would be great.
Thanks in advance!
Although comprehensive only in the sense that it attempts to cover the whole globe across most of the seventeenth century, with special focus on the impact of the Little Ice Age and associated abnormal El Nino episodes, Geoffrey Parker's book The Global Crisis (2013) is a major contribution by a senior historian to efforts to integrate social, political and environmental history.
Parker's thesis is that climate change during this period is crucial to understanding the very widespread political turmoil of the 17th century, which "saw more cases of simultaneous state breakdown around the globe than any previous or subsequent age" – from the Thirty Years War and British civil wars to the Fronde, the downfall of the Ming dynasty, civil war in Mughal India, the overthrow of the African kingdom of Kongo, and the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.
Parker contends that the period was also marked by a sharp increase in the number of revolts, and more and longer wars than occurred in any comparable period before the 20th century, all accompanied by dearth and plague leading to massive mortality – which in turn led (as Hobbes suggested in Leviathan) to the feeling that
"There is [now] no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; ... no arts; no letters; no society. And, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
and which prompted the contemporary Welsh historian James Howell to conclude that:
"God Almighty has a quarrel lately with all mankind, and given the reins to the ill spirit to compass the whole earth; for within these twelve years [1637-49] there have the strangest revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over, that have befallen mankind, I dare boldly say, since Adam fell, in so short a revolution of time ... [Such] monstrous things have happened [that] it seems the whole world is off the hinges."
Finally, although perhaps least persuasively, Parker also attempts to explain why Japan, pretty much alone among the major nations studied, escaped most of the problems caused by climate change in this period.
It's a very big book, but he writes extremely well and it flies by, if the subject matter itself grips you.