Book Review

El Niño in History: Storming through the Ages. By César N. Caviedes. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xiv + 279pp. $24.95.

These two books illustrate some of the charms—and perils—of using climate history to help understand social, economic, and political history. The difficulties are at least twofold. First, the record of climate history is spotty and imprecise. Before the late-nineteenth century it relies mainly on proxy evidence of one sort or another: tree rings, corals, air bubbles in glaciers and so on. But even within recent decades the evidence apparently is not unambiguous: In his account of the battle of Stalingrad, Caviedes says the winter of 1942–43 was severe; in his account, Brown states that it was not. The second difficulty is that there is no rigorous way to connect weather or climate change to historical events. Did drought help propel the Arab expansion of the seventh century? Did warmer weather encourage the Vikings to raid far and wide in the ninth-twelfth centuries? Did El Niño rains in 1532 make Pizarro's march to Cuzco easier? Maybe, but maybe not. In the context of several other simultaneous forces and trends, it is impossible to say with any assurance what role climate change or weather anomalies might have played in these events. Brown and Caviedes are more cautious than some others in this field, but nonetheless they occasionally run aground on the wilder shores of historical speculation.	1
Brown, a former meteorologist with an abiding interest in political history, concerns himself chiefly with Europe between A.D. 211 and 1350. He has read widely and deeply, especially in Roman history, although sometime his sources are not the best. He uses the economist J. K. Galbraith as an authority on the legacy of the Crusades, and uses woefully out-of-date sources to come to untenable judgments about the Ottoman Empire. Despite its subtitle, the book contains plenty of speculative tidbits on Chinese, Mongol, or Arab history. Brown includes some formidable climatology and makes few concessions to the lay reader. Swarming details—many of them fascinating and new to me—often obscure any sense of the bigger picture. The prose style is demanding as well. The organization is quirky: the fall of Rome, the Mongols, and the Greenland Norse each are discussed twice. Brown's great strength is that he is far from a climate determinist and is normally careful in his judgments. He concludes, for example, by saying that in the past "two millennia, climate variation has been unlikely to shape human destiny except in situations that were, in some sense or another, marginally poised in any case" (p. 299). But this sober view does not prevent occasional loose statements, such as that which attributes the high murder rate in medieval Iceland to environmental conditions (p. 129). In general, this book ought to interest climate historians and others willing to try to fit climate change into the larger web of history.	2
Caviedes, a geographer specializing in Latin America, focuses on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), its teleconnections, and their impacts. He explains the ENSO phenomenon thoroughly and clearly before embarking on a wide-ranging historical tour. His method at each stop on the tour is to review the sequence of drought or heavy rains provoked by ENSO, and then to suggest the historical consequences. His conclusion is much bolder than Brown's: "In several instances, the destiny of entire civilizations was radically altered by its [ENSO's] impact" (p. 172). Thus Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, Napoleon in Russia, Hitler at Stalingrad (to confine oneself to recent centuries) came a cropper because of ENSO weather anomalies. Well, perhaps. Or, more plausibly, perhaps ENSO helped tip the balance against these men and their ambitions. Unfortunately small mistakes detract from his case: Caviedes has Hitler invading the USSR in April of 1941; has the European discovery of Easter Island off by a century; has England winning the struggle for India in 1707; has Hungary a victim of Soviet expansion before 1941; and characterizes the Irish potato famine as "climate-induced" (p. 33). It is true that cooler weather aided the blight, but this is Hamlet without the prince because it ignores the fungus that killed the potato plants. Errors of this sort creep into every book manuscript, but this one needed more careful editing. There is much repetition throughout. The meaning of guano is explained three times by page 51. Only flawless execution could make a thesis as bold as Caviedes' persuasive, and this book falls short of that.	3
J.R. McNeill is professor of history at Georgetown University.

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