Book Recommendation: Nature's Mutiny
What does cold weather have to do with the gorgeous tones of a Stradivarius violin? Perhaps everything…
Europe was a colder place when Antonio Stradivari was crafting his famous violins at the beginning of the 18th century. The severe winters and shortened growing seasons of that era meant that trees grew more slowly and therefore tree rings formed closer together. These compacted tree rings, in turn, made for denser wood and—according to recent research—a better sounding violin.
The climatic origin of the Stradivarius’ sound is but one tale recounted in Philipp Blom’s Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present (2019). This book explores a period of global cooling—the Little Ice Age—to answer the questions: “Do societies change when the climate changes? And if so, how?” (20).
Blom convincingly argues that yes, Europe did undergo fundamental changes from the late 1500s to the early 1700s (the “long seventeenth century”), but he does not go so far as to claim that those changes were solely caused by the cold climate. Instead, the long winters and wet summers were one of several factors contributing to the social, economic, and material revolutions of the era. Blom’s history is multi-causal and intertwined.
For instance, let’s return to the Stradivarius. While Blom is intrigued by the theory that cold weather makes better violins, he also points out that many other people were using the same dense wood as Antonio Stradivari but making substandard violins. So cold weather can’t be the only factor that makes a Stradivarius a Stradivarius. Blom concludes that a “final answer will have to take into account more factors, but the study reminds us how vital are the material preconditions for all craft, all culture, and all art” (82).
This quote encapsulates the main theme of the book: that the environment—in this case the climate of the Little Ice Age—creates bounded possibilities for human action. In other words, the environment sets the limits for what can and cannot happen but does not determine events. One cannot herd cattle on Antarctica or economically grow strawberries in the middle of the Sahara—these are commonsense environmental boundaries.
Blom’s environmental narrative is more subtle. He begins with the poor growing conditions of the Little Ice Age and notes that from the late 1500s, the annual harvest became increasingly unpredictable and sometimes failed altogether. European society changed in response to this food insecurity in several ways.
Wealthy landholders adopted new strategies to shore up their wealth when it became evident that they could no longer rely on the annual grain tax for their fortune. They changed the landscape by building fences around common-held land. They changed the economy by investing in towns and long-distance trade.
Tenant farmers forcibly removed from their land contributed to the rising population of cities and nascent factory system. Some also rose up in protest over their loss of livelihood and the rising cost of bread. After all—though not the only cause of the French Revolution—there were three years of poor harvests before the storming of the Bastille.
Philosophers and theologians established new schools of thought—from Protestantism to rationalism—to understand a world in which old feudal social relations were breaking down and God had seemingly abandoned humanity to the icy claws of winter.
Nature’s Mutiny is full of fascinating narratives that elaborate on these narratives. Readers will explore the relationship between climate and Martin Luther, witchcraft, Spinoza, nutmeg, imperialism, wine, and Voltaire (to name a few) and ponder the questions: ““Do societies change when the climate changes? And if so, how?” In our current era of anthropogenic climate change, such questions are more important than ever.
Philipp Blom, Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019) ebook.
Review by Erica Mukherjee