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How the specter of climate has been used to explain history since antiquityScientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet and may even bring about the extinction of our species. Yet behind these anxieties lies an older, much deeper fear about the power that climate exerts over us. The Empire of Climate traces the history of this idea and its pervasive influence over how we interpret world events and make sense of the human condition, from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to the afflictions of the modern psyche.Taking readers from the time of Hippocrates to the unfolding crisis of global warming today, David Livingstone reveals how climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control and race relations; been used to explain industrial development, market performance, and economic breakdown; and served as a bellwether for national character and cultural collapse. He examines how climate has been put forward as an explanation for warfare and civil conflict, and how it has been identified as a critical factor in bodily disorders and acute psychosis.A panoramic work of scholarship, The Empire of Climate maps the tangled histories of an idea that has haunted our collective imagination for centuries, shedding critical light on the notion that everything from the wealth of nations to the human mind itself is subject to climate's imperial rule

AbstractThis article explores the religious response of one neglected writer to the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. William Todd Martin was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and in 1887 publishedThe Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy. The work demonstrates the essentially contested nature of "evolution" and "creation" by showing how a self-confessed creationist could affirm an evolutionary understanding of the natural world and species transformation. Martin's approach reflected a transatlantic Presbyterian worldview that saw the harmony of science and religion on the basis of Calvinism, Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Martin's critique is also relevant to issues that continue to animate philosophers of science and religion, including the connections between mind and matter, morality and consciousness in a Darwinian framework, and the relationship between subjective conscious experience and evolutionary physicalism. Martin was able to anticipate these debates because his critique was essentially philosophical and theological rather than biological and biblicist.

The ethnonational differentiation that characterizes life in Northern Ireland, dating from the seventeenth-century Plantation, is manifest in the high degree of residential segregation and recurrent violence in the Belfast urban area. In turn, this urban encapsulation of the ethnonational conflict exists in microcosm in the Shankill-Falls area of west Belfast. In our examination of how Protestant and Roman Catholic residents in this small area have responded to their environment, we suggest that the idea of the frontier provides a useful explanatory model for understanding the progressive demise of mutal interactions and the increasing hostility between the two groups over the past fifteen years. Each on the periphery of more secure ethnic heartlands, these residents are shown to be the victims of "multiple peripherality" at local, national, and international scales.

On geography and revolution / David N. Livingstone, Charles W.J. Withers -- Space, revolution, and science / Peter Dear -- National styles in science: a possible factor in the scientific revolution? / John Henry -- Geography, science, and the scientific revolution / Charles W.J. Withers -- Revolution of the space invaders: Darwin and Wallace on the geography of life / James Moore -- Printing the map, making a difference: mapping the Cape of Good Hope, 1488-1652 / Jerry Brotton -- Revolutions in the times: clocks and the temporal structures of everyday life / Paul Glennie, Nigel Thrift -- Photography, visual revolutions, and Victorian geography / James R. Ryan -- Geography's English revolutions: Oxford geography and the war of ideas, 1600-1660 / Robert J. Mayhew -- Edme Mentelle's geographies and the French revolution / Michael Heffernan -- "Risen into empire": moral geographies of the American republic / David N. Livingstone -- Alexander von Humboldt and revolution: a geography of reception of the Varnhagen von Ense correspondence / Nicolaas Rupke -- Afterward: revolutions and their geographies / Peter Burke