Given the growing threat that climate change poses for the future of humanity, Livingstone’s magisterial survey of historical ideas about climate’s impact on individuals and societies could not be more timely or cautionary. Due attention is given to Hippocrates, Ibn Khaldun, Montesquieu, and other classic progenitors of ideas about climate’s power over people, but the book’s primary focus is on the plethora of mainly Western scientists, philosophers, geographers, historians, economists, and other so-called thought leaders who have advanced theories over the past two centuries about how climate has shaped human evolution and personal experience. The troubling theme that threads through this intellectual tradition is its climatic determinism.
Livingstone’s meticulous genealogy of ideas about the “empire of climate” focuses on four main categories of human experience—health, mind, wealth, and war. Medical geography, medical climatology, and biometeorology pathologized certain parts of the world as innately unhealthy. The tropics in particular were seen...