Climate and Historical Change during the Holocene. How Does Paleoclimatology Change Historical Work?

Résumé

This lecture will explore a simple question: Does the historical human experience of climate change since the last Ice Age matter to us now as we confront the very pressing problems raised by an unprecedented rate of change in a rapidly warming world? This question is simple enough but the answer is quite far from straightforward. And in fact I see no simple rule or model that can be gained by looking at historical climate change. Human history and human societies are complex, as is the Earth’s climate system.

Joseph Manning

My earlier work was focused on Hellenistic Mediterranean economic and legal history with a concentration on Ptolemaic Egypt. Over the past ten years my research has taken a very different direction. I am now working within an even broader historical framework examining climatic change at various scales, and global societal "responses" to climate change over the last ten thousand years. I have a forthcoming book on historical climate change with Liveright (Norton). The book examines human societies since the last Ice Age and the role of climatic change, among many other factors, in understanding change. In this case the goal is to understand complexity, rather than to simplify. I lay out my philosophy, including the necessity of working in teams, in the first chapter of my last monograph, The Open Sea, Princeton University Press, 2018.