Books April 1, 2019 Issue

How the Little Ice Age Changed

History
Starting in the fourteenth century, cooling temperatures disrupted our economic and social
structures—and may have given rise to the modern world.

By John Lanchester
The big chill helped disrupt a settled order of feudalism and restrictive guilds. Illustration by Pieter Van Eenoge

t is easy to forget just how variable the climate of the earth has been, across the
I geologic time scale. That is partly because the extent of that variability is so
difficult to imagine. A world entirely covered in ice, from pole to pole—the so-called
snowball earth—is something we nd it hard to get our heads around, even though
the longest and oldest period of total or near-total glaciation, the Huronian
glaciation, lasted for three hundred million years. A world without ice is also hard to
visualize, though it is by comparison a much more recent phenomenon: perhaps only
thirty-four million years ago, crocodiles swam in a freshwater lake we know as the
North Pole, and palm trees grew in Antarctica. The reality is that our planet
oscillates between phases with no ice, phases with all ice, and phases in the middle.
The middle is where we happen to be right now—a fact that is responsible for our
faulty perception of the earth’s climate as accommodating and stable.

In the roughly ve thousand years of recorded human history, there has been one
period in which we have had a real taste of our climate’s potential for moodiness,
beginning around the start of the fourteenth century and lasting for hundreds of
years. During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped
by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Compared with the
extremes of snowball earth, that might not sound like much, but for people who
lived through it the change was intensely dramatic. This was also the period between
the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world. In a new book,
Nature’s Mutiny:
“Nature’s Mutiny: How
How the
the Little
Little Ice
Ice Age
Age of
of the
the Long
Long Seventeenth
Seventeenth Century
Century
Transformed the West and Shaped the Present ” (Liveright), the German-born,
Vienna-based historian Philipp Blom argues that this is no coincidence—that there
is a complex relationship between the social, economic, and intellectual disruption
caused by the changed climate and the emerging era of markets, exploration, and
intellectual freedom which constituted the beginning of the Enlightenment.

The Little Ice Age is an example of how we so often nd complete consensus

around every aspect of climate change. Just kidding. We know for sure that the earth
became cooler: the evidence can be found through a variety of techniques for
assessing historical temperatures, such as the study of ice cores and tree rings. There
are also extensive written accounts of the cold in the form of letters and diaries,
sermons, the records of wine growers, and so on. The cooling happened in phases,
with an initial drop beginning around 1300, and a sharper and more abrupt onset of
cold starting in 1570 and lasting for about a hundred and ten years. It is the latter
period that provides the focus for Blom’s book. Agreement about the fact that the
cooling occurred, however, is not matched by an equivalent consensus about why.

There is evidence that the cooling may have been caused by a decrease in sunspot
activity, and therefore in solar radiation, or by an increase in volcanic eruptions.
(Though the seismic causality might be the other way around, as Blom explains:
changes in oceanic currents could have altered pressures on the continental shelves,
which “may in turn have contributed to the increase in volcanic eruptions and
earthquakes reported during this period.”) There is evidence, too, that the cooling
was to at least some extent man-made. So many people died of disease in the
Americas after the arrival of Columbus— fty-six million, according to the latest
research in Quaternary Science Reviews—and so many areas of cleared, cultivated
land were abandoned, and thus allowed to reforest, that CO2 levels were measurably
reduced and the planet’s temperature lowered. Blom does the sensible thing and
dodges a nal verdict on what caused all those vicious winters.

Whatever the cause, the effects were pronounced. Although Blom’s focus is Europe,
the most densely settled northerly area of the planet, he makes it clear that the
effects of the Little Ice Age were global in scale. In China, then as now the most
populous country in the world, the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, undermined by,
among other things, erratic harvests. In Europe, rivers and lakes and harbors froze,
leading to phenomena such as the “frost fairs” on the River Thames—fairgrounds
that spread across the river’s London tideway, which went from being a freakish
rarity to a semi-regular event. (Virginia Woolf set a scene in “ Orlando” at one.)
Birds iced up and fell from the sky; men and women died of hypothermia; the King
of France’s beard froze solid while he slept. Some of the central events of English
history turn out to have been linked to the Little Ice Age: in 1588, the Spanish
Armada was destroyed by an unprecedented Arctic hurricane, and a factor in the
Great Fire of London, in 1666, was the ultra-dry summer that succeeded the
previous, bitter winter. Fingerprints of the cold period can be found in surprising
places. Why do the most admired violins in the history of music, made by
Stradivarius and Guarneri, come from the middle of the Little Ice Age? Blom cites
research arguing that trees took longer to mature in the cold, which resulted in a
denser wood, with “better sound qualities and more intense resonance.”

he most consequential effect of the frigid weather, Blom argues convincingly,

T was to disrupt the harvest, especially the grain harvest. It led to a fundamental
shift in the social order across Europe, and beyond. The Little Ice Age amounted to
“a long-term, continent-wide agricultural crisis,” as Blom writes. Grain harvests did
not return to their previous levels for a hundred and eighty years. That affected
everything about how society worked. Before this moment in European history,
society was largely organized along feudal lines. The bulk of the population
consisted of peasants, living on land owned by a lordly overclass. Town life,
meanwhile, was dominated by restrictive guilds, and, in Blom’s description, it “valued
social capital—class and family standing, trustworthiness, competition—but did not
encourage anyone to reach beyond his station.” This settled order, which had lasted
for centuries, was overturned. At rst, there were panics and uprisings, food riots
and rebellions, and a spike in witch trials—because, in a pre-scienti c world, the
idea that witches were responsible for failing harvests made as much sense as any
other explanation.

Over time, however, larger structural shifts emerged. In the basic bargain of feudal
life, a peasant kept one part of his harvest for himself, put one part back into the
ground for the next year’s harvest, and gave the last part to his feudal lord. When
peasants had no surplus grain, this system collapsed. If local crops were failing,
trading at a distance, to bring goods from farther a eld, was critical. Money, and the
ability to buy and sell with cash or its equivalent, took on a larger role. Cities with a
culture of trade especially bene tted from this shift. The preëminent example in
“Nature’s Mutiny” is Amsterdam, which went from being a sleepy backwater of the
Habsburg Empire to a thriving, economically dynamic center of rapidly expanding
commercial networks, with a population that grew tenfold in just over a century.

Here we see the birth of the idea that markets, and the rules of markets, have
supremacy in human affairs; we also see how the new dispensation offered
opportunities to a new breed of ambitious, ruthless, commercially minded man.
Amsterdam was the home of one of the world’s rst big exploitative overseas
businesses, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie),
or V.O.C. Blom tells the story of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a V.O.C. official who
burned down the Indonesian city of Jakarta and then led an expedition to punish
traders on nearby islands who had broken the V.O.C. monopoly on nutmeg by
selling to English and Portuguese merchants. Coen executed the merchants, killed
fteen thousand islanders, and sold the survivors into slavery. His feats in Indonesia
would not have been possible, he told the company directors, “had not the Almighty
fought on our side and blessed us.” For true believers, God and the rules of markets
were becoming inseparable—a con ation that, Blom argues, was taken to justify the
exploitation of both people and natural resources and would lead us to our
contemporary moment of environmental crisis.

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This is a sweeping story, embracing developments in economics and science,

philosophy and exploration, religion and politics. Blom delivers much of his
argument through compressed, beautifully clear life sketches of prominent men. We
meet the philosopher (and retired soldier) René Descartes, the mage and proto-
scientist John Dee, the essayist Michel Montaigne, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius
Kircher, the excommunicated Jewish philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, the
encyclopedist Pierre Bayle, and the great painter Rembrandt van Rijn, who both
depicted and embodied the new human landscape of Dutch economic
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In the course of “Nature’s Mutiny,” therefore, we travel a considerable distance from
the subject of unusually cold weather. Too far, a reader might think, for Blom’s
argument to be regarded as a case conclusively settled. But it wouldn’t be fair to
“Nature’s Mutiny” to see the issue of proof so starkly. It is a book about a new
economic system and the philosophical and cultural trends that accompanied it;
climate is central to the story that it tells, but the connections don’t aim for the
solidity of algebraic logic. Rather, Blom is seeking to give us a larger picture that is
relevant to the current moment. His book is about links and associations rather than
about de nitive proof; it is about networks and shifts in intellectual mood, about
correlations as much as causes. Despite that, Blom’s hypothesis is forceful, and has
the potential to be both frightening and, if you hold it up to the light at just the
right angle, a little optimistic. The idea can be put like this: climate change changes
everything. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 1, 2019, issue, with the headline “The
Ice Capades.”

John Lanchester is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and has written
for The New Yorker since 1995. His latest novel is “ The Wall.” Read more »

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