Introduction: eco-historicism.

Climate has long been the third rail of professional historiography. Climatic determinism, with its roots in Hippocratic theory, figures among the great embarrassments of the early modern history of ideas: an intellectual adjunct to European imperialism and institutionalized racism. Enlightenment writers such as Montesquieu offered climatic rationalizations for the putative "laziness" and inferiority of African, Asian, and Pacific cultures, legitimating their subjection and conceiving, in the process, the embryo of biological race theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Until very recently, to suggest climate as an influence on human culture and history has been ...