Coping with climate change in past societies | BSR Online

This event will take place via Zoom and requires advance registration. 

John Haldon (Princeton), John Sabapathy (UCL) and Chris Wickham (BSR; Oxford). Chaired by Georgina Endfield (Liverpool)

Our panel will consider how humans in different past societies responded to changes in climate, and how they overcame them – or failed to. We need to understand how this worked if we are to understand how to manage the climate crisis. History has lessons here, which technologically more complex contemporary societies need to take into account, and learn from.

John Haldon

Lessons from the past? History and societal resilience

How can we best approach the question of the degree to which past social and cultural systems have responded, successfully or not, to various types of challenge, including environmental challenges, and the degree to which an understanding of this can contribute to contemporary policy and planning for sustainability and resilience?  I will consider two aspects – the resilience of socio-economic systems as systems; and the actions of the agents who comprise that system in maintaining or eroding sustainable practices in respect of their environment and resources.

John Haldon is Director of the Climate Change and History Research Initiative (https://cchri.princeton.edu/) and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies Environmental History Lab at Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of the medieval eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire; on state systems across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times; on the impact of environmental stress on societal resilience in pre-modern social systems; and on the production, distribution and consumption of resources in the late ancient and medieval world. 

John Sabapathy

Registering and responding to climate change in pre-modern Europe

Medieval analysts were sharp observers of particular, especially local, climate anomalies and fluctuations, and responded to them. They also registered climate as a discrete, rationally explicable phenomenon. This talk will explore some points of connection and disconnection between medieval registration and response to climate change in later medieval Europe. I will think about resilience not just as a practical, but also a mental, response to the scale of climatic influence. In our contemporary conjuncture, where the very way in which we imagine climate change is reckoned a hyperobject, I want to explore a quite different historical configuration between climatic observation, rationalization, and response, exploring the relationship between them.

John Sabapathy is Associate Professor of Medieval History and co-convenor of UCL Anthropocene at University College London. He works on problems of institutionalization: how humans create institutions yet find it hard to reform or escape what they have created. He is currently writing a history of thirteenth-century Europe, including its climate. In a previous life he worked in sustainable development and public policy. 

Georgina Endfield

Georgina Endfield’s research focuses on environmental and climate history and historical climatology. Endfield’s expertise is in the use of historical records for the reconstruction of climate variability and environmental change and she draws on a breadth of largely unpublished archival sources and oral history approaches to investigate: the histories of climate variability in a variety of spatial and temporal contexts in colonial Mexico; to explore the timing, impacts of and responses to extreme weather events across the UK (past 400 years); and to investigate historical climate variability, and associated socio economic implications in southern Africa (nineteenth and early twentieth century). She is a past President of the International Commission for the History of Meteorology, past Editor on The Anthropocene Review (Sage) and Environment and History (White Horse Press) and is a 2021 REF Sub-Panel Assessor and Interdisciplinary Research Advisor for Unit of Assessment 14 (Geography and Environmental Studies).

Chris Wickham

Professor Chris Wickham is the BSR’s current Director. He is the Chichele Professor of Medieval History (Emeritus) and a fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy. He is a former Head of the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford and also emeritus professor of Medieval History at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include Italian history to 1250, comparative European, Mediterranean and global medieval history, social history and archaeology. Chris has previously been Chair of Publications for the BSR (1995-2000), as well as a member of its Council (1995-2000 and 2006-9).