3. Predicting the Past? Integrating Vulnerability, Climate and Culture during Historical Famines

Pages2k (past global changes of the last two millennia) is a multinational working group focusing on climate reconstructions. Its papers and official press releases, for example, focus exclusively on reconstructions, refraining from any interpretation of possible societal impacts. Nonetheless, these gaps encourage journalists to take licence and charge these reconstructions with populist narratives. For example, the leading German news site Spiegel Online, featured the paper (PAGES 2k Consortium 2013) with the headline “The fall of civilisations explained” and incorporated sweeping assumptions on the fate of “the Romans” or “the Mayans” (Bojanowski 2013). In another typical move, a “science podcast” (Science Magazine 2012) as well as an article on climate and the “collapse of ancient Maya civilization” (Science Daily 2012) are the result of PR “material provided by the University of Southern California,” to flank a more cautious scientific article on the day of its publication (Kennett et al. 2012). To a certain extent, the same division of labour is present in the separation of working groups I (“the physical science basis”) and II (“impacts, adaptations and vulnerability”) in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC).

Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992) used the term “silent referents” to describe narratives that continue to shape our knowledge even when they have slipped from an individual’s power of disposal over time. While he refers to colonial discourse, similar historical narratives of decline and ascent shape our understanding of ‘climate’ and its societal impacts. On the (fragile) historical grounding of modern imaginaries dealing with ‘climate refugees’ see, for example, Lübken (2012).

However, the supposed impact of climate on the French Revolution has remained a popular topic (Fagan 2002; Le Roy Ladurie 2006).

The crises of the 1770s are at the focus of an interdisciplinary research group on eighteenth century famines, uniting palaeoclimatologists, anthropologists and historians at Heidelberg University: http://​www.​hce.​uni-heidelberg.​de/​jrg/​facingfamine.​html.

For an account of these conflicts, see, for example, Arand (1773), particularly pp. 143–153, and on the displacement of non-academic physicians during the hygric anomaly, pp. 163–176. A colleague of his used the famine in Bengal to discuss the relation of climate and health for similar ends (see pp. 110–144 in Hecker 1839).

Early modern European medicine rested on the concept of bodily fluids. Extreme climates such as hotness, coldness or humidity could throw them off balance and result in disease. Even though proponents of the competing miasma theory regarded contagion as a more important factor, the communicating agents (bacteria and viruses) were not discovered until much later, resulting in futile and often counter-productive treatments.

For an overview of the heated discussion that prompted a flood of publications, particularly in hard-hit Saxony, where the church was under particular stress, see Wagner (1773).