Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present
    Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present
    Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present
    Audiobook10 hours

    Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

    Written by Philipp Blom

    Narrated by Jonathan Keeble

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    An illuminating work of environmental history that chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, which transformed the social and political fabric of Europe.

    Although hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, the temperature by the end of the sixteenth century plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbors were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and "frost fairs" were erected on a frozen Thames-with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city.

    Recounting the deep legacy and far-ranging consequences of this "Little Ice Age," acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had subtly, but ineradicably, changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, they gave rise to the growth of European cities, the emergence of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A timely examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature's Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 16, 2019
    ISBN9781684418312
    Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present
    Author

    Philipp Blom

    Philipp Blom was born in 1970 in Hamburg and grew up in Detmold, in Germany. After university studies in Vienna and Oxford, he obtained a D.Phil in Modern History. He started writing at Oxford and published a novel as well as occasional journalism, moving on to London, where he worked as an editor, translator, writer and freelance journalist, contributing to newspapers, magazines and radio programmes in Great Britain, the US, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and France. In 2001, Philipp Blom moved to Paris to concentrate on his books. In 2007 he settled in Vienna, where he continues to write nonfiction, such as Nature's Mutiny, as well as fiction, films, and occasional journalism. He presents a cultural discussion programme on Austrian national radio and has lectured on history, philosophy, and cultural history in Europe, the US, and South America. He is married to Veronica Buckley, who is also a writer.

    Related to Nature's Mutiny

    Related audiobooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      'Sea People' Examines The Origins And History Of Polynesia

      Mar 13, 2019

      Christina Thompson deftly weaves her fascinating narrative of European travels and attempts to understand the Polynesian puzzle in her new book, though European colonization is not fully addressed.

      3 min read

    • Article

      We Need to Talk About Peat

      Nov 7, 2019

      In his poems about strange bodies buried in the bogs of Northern Europe, the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes peatlands filled with “drowned-mouse fibres dried up and the whole limp, soggy cluster … Of weed leaf and turf mould.” Such is th

      7 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Around The World In 100 Plants

      Oct 26, 2022

      Simon Barnes (Simon & Schuster, £30) WE have become used, in recent years, to the convention of 100 short essays as a means of raising the reader’s eyebrows and setting away a never-ending series of big ideas from the starting point of an everyday o

      5 min read

    • Article

      All’s White With The World

      Dec 14, 2022

      All’s White With The World
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Potter For Our Times

      Sep 1, 2021

      WHEN perusing this attractively packaged biography of ceramics impresario Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), your reviewer was prompted to recall one of the few joyous moments of lockdown, Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throw Down (GPTD): a show that reveals

      5 min read

    • Article

      Late Constable Review – A Thrilling Enigma

      Oct 31, 2021

      A hard rain falls on a glittering grey sea. Wind harries sullen clouds across low-lying horizons. Overcast skies shed a pale glare on the churned earth below. Thunder and gloom, turbid brown rivers, corn standing solid as a wall at the field’s edge b

      4 min read

    • Article

      To Make Art Is To Be Human

      Oct 13, 2021

      IN 1950, Ernst Gombrich published The Story of Art. The book was an instant bestseller and was the first to show that there was, indeed, such a thing as a story of art, that artists and movements existed not in isolated moments of time, but as part o

      7 min read

    • Article

      I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls

      Sep 15, 2021

      THIS is a deft and stylish exploration of a vast and complex topic. The author, a former Architectural Editor and Editor of COUNTRY LIFE, has visited hundreds of country houses, investigating and understanding their stories, and this naturally inform

      5 min read

    • Article

      An Autumn Choice

      Sep 28, 2022

      An Autumn Choice
      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 2, 2019

      Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulf-stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring. —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1854 [T]he pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to

      4 min read

    • Article

      Chapter & verse

      Feb 10, 2023

      Chapter & verse
      7 min read

    • Article

      Chapter & verse

      Feb 10, 2023

      Chapter & verse
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Sword Of Swords

      Nov 23, 2022

      (Birlinn, £22) THE perfect sword—the highest expression of the blacksmith’s art—is arguably a pattern-welded, 7th-century blade of iron and steel, buried three centuries later at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. After 1,000 years, the rusted blade

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Landscape Was His Mistress

      Feb 9, 2022

      IN 1802, John Constable wrote seven observations and resolutions about art. In them, among other things, he pledged to follow Nature, to make ‘unaffected’ pictures, and to avoid ‘common place people’. He also declared that ‘there is no easy way of be

      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2021

      If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 3, 2019

      You are old when your longtime friend Melvin, turned seventy-five, writes you in rage about becoming old. … Melvin knows nothing about old age: Melvin can walk upstairs! Melvin flies to the West Indies with his girlfriend and his wife! In your eighti

      3 min read

    • Article

      In For The Kill

      Dec 1, 2021

      In For The Kill
      2 min read

    • Article

      Poem Of The Week: From ‘Proof …’ By Peter Riley

      Nov 6, 2023

      (6) The Refugee in a sleeping-bag on a steel floor opens his eyes on darkness and wonders did he remember before he left to visit the old holm oak up the fields, to hold the spiked leaf in his hand and listen to what it said? Go, it said, go now

      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      knew his seams both false & true, his garters, nifty eyelets. A gainful trade,stockings being what they were: always ruined or runneled: even Queen E’s silk fixed, darned at the tooes. He owned a brickworks, too. Wrote novels. Pamphlets. One about re

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Remains Of The Day

      Jan 11, 2023

      The Remains Of The Day
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Alchemy of November

      Nov 15, 2017

      The Alchemy of November
      5 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Feb 23, 2022

      Great Read
      4 min read

    • Article

      Things To Do

      Feb 6, 2019

      Serious architecture buffs should head along to the New Zealand Institute of Architect’s biennial conference at the Spark Arena in Auckland. Eleven leading international architects will be presenting over the first two days while the Saturday feature

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Nature's Mutiny

    3.5/5

    44 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Wery well written, with many interesting details. Pity all these do not allow a more optimistic conclusion.
      Nonetheless I will review the author other writings too.

      BTW: since 2020 March we did not have new reviews! We need them!
    • 4/5
      Nature's Mutiny by German historian Philipp Blom is reminiscent of a Jared Diamond book. He asks a question about our modern day and looks back on history for parallels to test a 'natural experiment'. Blom asks, if the climate is rapidly changing, how does society respond? He picks the Little Ice Age as it as the last time the climate changed rapidly, about 2 C colder during a roughly 100 year period. He chooses Europe because of the documentation available and his professional background. What he proposes is society become more mercantile orientated because of increased globalization which was a survival response to the failed harvests and other conditions that made life more difficult, requiring expanded trade to bring in resources needed. Capitalism, rationalism, science were all responses to a more difficult environment. Of course it is not that simple there were contingencies specific to Europe, other places in the world didn't respond this way. So it's hard to say what one can really conclude from Blom's investigation. Nevertheless it is an interesting overview of various aspects of the 17th century, anything by Blom is worth reading.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      There are basically two ways to approach this book, which is essentially an extended essay. On one hand, you can basically treat it as a potted history of how the Little Ice Age of the subtitle was a hammer that broke the Medieval mindset and opened the way to the Enlightenment and market values that, twenty or so years ago, seemed to represent the "end of history." However, Blom, who wrote this book as a way of understanding how societies respond to global climate changes, suggests that the our much-celebrated market and rationalist values should be understood as a very manicured version of the intellectual ferment of the "long" seventeenth century, and that the way forward is going to depend on setting aside cultural triumphalism and engaging in some hard-headed engagement with the world as it is, which would entail, at the very least, a more modest understanding of our personal place in the world. Otherwise Humanity would seem to be in store for another war of all against all.

      1 person found this helpful