The global understanding of enslavement owes a great deal to the efforts of scholars who research its history in non-Atlantic societies, including Muslim-majority ones. In recent years, the study of enslavement in the Middle East and North Africa has achieved a volume, a dynamic, and a maturity that make it one of the leading, cutting-edge subfields in studies encompassing that part of the globe. Reilly’s Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula is a worthy contribution to this growing literature, covering a significant lacuna in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arabia with extensive and often innovative research.

A special issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews —entitled “Mediterranean Holocene Climate, Environment and Human Societies”—demonstrates why and how historians interested in premodern environmental history should work collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries to draw conclusions. A series of mini–case studies and a survey of recent scholarship, as prompted by this collection, explores the advantages and challenges of attempting to realize such consilience. Although the special issue focuses on Mediterranean Europe during the late antique–medieval periods, all historians interested in the complex relationship between climate and societal change will find that it yields deeper reflections and issues.

Despite its main title, Mungiu-Pippidi’s The Quest for Good Governance is primarily about the conceptualization, measurement, and reduction of corruption throughout history. Its wealth of provocative heuristic ideas is invaluable for contemporary social science. For readers of this journal, across several disciplines, the book offers an admirable re-thinking of many received notions that have influenced our understanding of how American, European, Asian, and African governments have coped with the realities of corruption, and how corruption continues to distort their various national and/or developmental trajectories.

The volume, Lives in Transition , edited by Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood, provides a valuable sampling of empirical research by historians using longitudinal data. It improves upon the current understanding of a variety of historical issues by focusing on different aspects and stages of individual life courses and identifying questions for further study. It demonstrates the important empirical challenges and presents a variety of substantive topics for longitudinal examination. Overall, the book’s chapters show that analysis of longitudinal data illuminates historical studies in new ways, providing insights about the factors affecting changes in individual lives.

Scholars from multiple disciplines generally agree about new models for the origin and dating of migration to the Western Hemisphere, replacing the rigid Clovis-first model that had dominated texts for the past fifty years. This new research has not resolved all of the questions relating to this migration; serious controversies still exist. But the development of the new field of genetic studies and the recent opening of major South American archaeological sites has resolved many older debates and has provided a far more nuanced and complex early history of mankind in the Western Hemisphere than existed before.

Around the world, particularly in the United States, debates about environmental protection have become ever-more fractious and polarized, following a radical shift in the collective understanding of environmental challenges and the appropriate responses to them. Whereas in the 1970s and the 1980s, environmental protection took the form of government-led action and intergovernmental treaty making, today it comes primarily under the heading of market capitalism and technological optimism. Sabin’s The Bet traces the growing politicization of, and free-market triumphalism around, environmental matters since the late 1960s in the context of the highly public wager between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon that has become the stuff of legend in environmental circles.

Scholars sometimes misunderstand the role that law plays in achieving social change. Law in the United States represents the codification of normative ideologies, or creedal narratives. New ideologies can take hold in society only as the result of deep and wide structural changes that cause the gradual erosion of others. Lawmakers—whether judicial or political—eventually give these new ideologies legitimacy. Contrary to Bruce Ackerman’s contention in We the People , the law follows social change, not vice versa.

John Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global History is a significant contribution to deep history and an impressive elucidation of the intersection between environmental studies and historical sociology. Brooke’s primary argument is that climate change is a “joker,” a wild card incompatible with theories of deep history that are based on Malthusian theory. However, because of his limited presentation of Malthusianism and his ambiguous treatment of “endogenous” and “exogenous” causal factors, he misses an opportunity to integrate social-science models of long-range historical development with the powerful forces of environmental change.

Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century is the fullest statement of the seventeenth-century crisis to date; it is an epic history with an enormous cast. But the people and institutions that it covers must share the historical stage with another agent of change—the Little Ice Age, which functions as the glue that holds together the era's myriad of events, producing an agricultural, political, and military crisis of global proportions. What is missing in Parker's account is a credible explanation for his version of the “great divergence”—the fact that resolution of the crisis took a different and fateful form in one region of Eurasia but in none of the others. Parker's claims about the Little Ice Age are ultimately testable, but his claim that it laid the basis for the “great divergence” remains mysterious.

Three recent volumes—Parés and Sansi (eds.), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic ; Paton and Forde (eds.), Obeah and Other Powers ; and Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World —set a new bar for scholarship about Caribbean and Latin American sorcery, stressing its contingency as well as its transnational and cosmopolitan aspects. Their richly contextualized case studies of African-derived practices related to illness and health, as well as the quotidian experience of slaves outside the plantation, challenge the most entrenched assumptions about sorcery and extend its use to a range of social actors, not just slaves. In the process, they serve to relocate the practice of sorcery in Latin America within a broad comparative framework that includes Europe and the Americas as well as Africa.

Historians at one time emphasized the critical causal interventions of important individuals, ascribing decisive differences in outcomes across time and place to human agency and idiosyncratic initiative. Subsequently, structure, contingency, and a collection of nonidiosyncratic choices became more prominent in causal explanations. Culture, geography, climate, economic circumstance, ideology, etc., became the favored variables in attempts to answer significant questions about key turning points in the global past. In Why Nations Fail , however, Acemoglu and Robinson demonstrate that leadership and governance matter much more than we thought. Although structural analyses add powerfully to our research, it is the quality of leadership that often determines whether a state is to flourish politically or economically.

The promise of scientific history and scientifically informed history is more modest today than it was in the nineteenth century, when a number of intellectuals hoped to transform history into a scientific mode of inquiry that would unite the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and reveal profound truths about human nature and destiny. But Edmund Russell in Evolutionary History and Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson in Natural Experiments of History demonstrate that historians can write interdisciplinary, comparative analyses using the strategies of nonexperimental natural science to search for deep patterns in human behavior and for correlates to those patterns that can lead to a better, though not infallible, understanding of historical causality.

Concerns about the anthropogenic ecological degradation of the planet—deforestation, species endangerment, pollution, and an increasing carbon footprint—have prompted numerous studies calling for wide-ranging, comprehensive global programs. In this regard, Tim Flannery's effort in Here on Earth to enlist Alfred Russel Wallace, a nineteenth-century naturalist, in the service of a twentieth-century idea falls prey to presentism on the grounds of a conceptual misunderstanding and incomplete or interpolated primary data.

Alexis de Tocqueville watched with horror as American society and politics changed in the two decades following the publication of Democracy in America . During the 1840s and 1850s, the factors that Tocqueville had earlier identified as sustaining the republic—its land and location, its laws, and its mores—had begun to undermine it. Recent work on civil society, the public sphere, and social capital is congruent with a Tocquevillian analysis of the causes of the Civil War. The associational networks that had once functioned as bridging social capital fractured under the stress of slavery, becoming sources of divisive regional, bonding social capital.

According to Keith Thomas in The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England , the social value system defining what constituted a life well lived changed dramatically in the period between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, becoming more individualistic and secular, as well as less aristocratic and hierarchical. Although Thomas' subtly argued and beautifully written study draws on a vast array of sources and demonstrates his vast expertise in the fields of early modern intellectual and cultural history, it does contain a number of conceptual and methodological problems that serve to undermine aspects of the argument. Ultimately, a more comparative approach would have proven beneficial, although it is certainly easier to make a case for secularization over time if one chooses to leave out religion.

Eltis and Richardson's Extending the Frontiers is the first volume to analyze the latest, monumental, installment of their slave-voyage database. However, despite the volume's laudable synthesis of primary and secondary data about intra-Caribbean enslaved migration, its considerable contribution to scholarship about the operations of slaving ships from specific countries, and its important findings from the raw data concerning the scale and direction of the enforced migration, the volume has one fundamental shortcoming. It fails to engage experts who might have helped to explain significant implications concerning the people who were actually enslaved and the merchants and political authorities in Africa who were involved in enslaving them.

Widespread forced disappearances, summary executions, and torture practiced by the military regimes in Argentina and Chile came to define human rights abuse during the 1970s and 1980s. Opposition to these practices and their parent regimes helped to shape the contemporary human rights movement and, by extension, human rights norms and institutions. Thomas C. Wright's State Terrorism in Latin America contends that the movement's struggle with the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships resulted in an era of greater deterrence and enforcement power for human rights institutions. Sonia Cardenas' Conflict and Compliance , however, maintains that despite the advance in norms and the creation of supranational structures to promote accountability for human rights abuse, the mechanisms for changing state practice have remained remarkably constant throughout the past three decades. Both in Latin America and elsewhere, domestic forces and cost-benefit analysis—at times aided by international pressure—continue to be the principal determinants of state behavior in the field of human rights.

During the past two decades, a well-organized group of social scientists has proclaimed a new paradigm of childhood that views children as subjects and childhood as socially constructed. An explanation of why these claims are not new from a historical perspective requires a deep understanding of the landscape of modern childhood and its intellectual origins. The terms of modern childhood have long positioned children as subjects who know by making them objects of knowledge. This paradox cannot be circumvented without the introduction of an entirely new language of personhood.

Emanuel Swedenborg, an engineer and mystic of the Enlightenment, prophesied that mankind's spiritual perfection was to be found deep in the heart of Africa. That idea unleashed a flurry of scientific and geographical inquiry among his disciples and other Swedes that has long been neglected. In addition to stimulating an era of romantic colonization in Africa, some of the activity and enthusiasm of the Swedenborgians contributed significantly to the abolitionist agitation that eventually ended the slave trade.