The best books on premodern societies, climate, and environment

This book offers a magisterial survey of the last 10,000 years and puts human history firmly in its full environmental context. There are many different ways of writing about the past, but historical writing is above all about how and why things change over time, about the causal dynamics underlying how societies, economies, and cultures work and transform. But in order to achieve this historians have first of all to establish a narrative – their own particular narrative – and it is their critical analysis of the ways in which this narrative can be constructed that helps us understand the past and that can help inform our understanding of the present. This book succeeds wonderfully in this fundamental task.

“Collapse” is a term frequently bandied about in the press and popular as well as academic historical writing. Middleton’s book, well-informed by the palaeoenvironmental, archaeological, and documentary evidence shines a powerful light on some of the pervasive myths about supposed historical collapses, many of which were not at all what the term might suggest. He challenges us to think carefully and critically about what we really know about a past civilisation before we rush into easy judgements. His book made me rethink many of my own assumptions on the subject and undoubtedly influenced my own work.

This is a wonderful illustration of how to do integrated, holistic history that takes into account every aspect of the way a society works and evolves. Combining archaeology with landscape history, social, political, and economic history, Izdebski’s book is also a handbook on how to do environmental history, with detailed and informative methodological considerations on the problems that come with it. It is quite technical in places, but really sets out very clearly how historians who want to incorporate palaeoscientific data into their discussion should be doing it.

This really is a “great read”, an exemplary and multi-faceted discussion by one of the leading historians of the early medieval world in western Eurasia. Integrating archaeological with documentary research and a vast range of sources of many different kinds, it offers a coherent, consistent and plausible account of the beginnings and early development of the post-Roman world in Europe, N. Africa, and the Middle East, covering also the origins of Islam and its impacts as well as the rise of the Carolingian empire and the origins and foundation of modern European politics and nations. Technically refined, clearly, coherently and entirely persuasively argued, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the end of the ancient and the beginnings of the medieval world in Europe and the surrounding lands.

This book by Oliver Rackham, the doyen of British landscape history, offers the reader a detailed and more chronologically specific discussion to accompany and in many respects to illustrate the argument in Neil Roberts’s The Holocene. If you want to understand the long process of landscape evolution, the amazing continuities, and deep structures of the British landscape, this is the perfect book. Through detailed discussion of the sources, written, archaeological and environmental, the author presents a topic-by-topic study of every aspect of the British countryside and its deep history, from the Neolithic to the present. I thought I understood something of all this until I read Rackham’s revealing, instructive, and deeply impressive book.  Well-written and scholarly yet entirely accessible, this is one of my favourite, and still most useful, books.