Description: Explores the resilience of the Dutch Republic in the face of preindustrial climate change during the Little Ice Age.
Brief description: Dagomar Degroot is an Assistant Professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. He is the co-founder of the Climate History Network, an organization of more than 200 academics in the sciences and humanities.
Review Quotes: '... this book offers a measured and painstaking reconstruction of some of the climate-related challenges facing Dutch society, as probably the most prosperous of the early modern period, in an age of comparatively cool and stormy weather ... The book opens with a very clear explanation of the complex dynamics of climate change and climatic systems that governed prevailing winds and pressure systems in north-west Europe ... Nevertheless, what this book demonstrates as effectively as any other is the overwhelming significance of the weather and the seasons in early modern European life, and for that reason alone, it deserves to be widely read and lauded.' Paul Warde, Metascience