Climate and History: Hunger, Anti-Semitism, and Reform During the Tambora Crisis of 1815–1820

Abstract

Wolfgang Behringer introduces a truly global interpretation of a singular natural catastrophe into mainstream historiography. He reminds us that climate change moves history, conclusively demonstrating how something as seemingly banal as the weather can evoke fundamental political, economic and cultural change. Even if historical responses were regionally contingent, the ubiquity of reaction evidences the historical significance of climate change. Thus was the reaction to the eruption of Gunung Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in April 1815, the greatest volcanic explosion in human history. As a cloud of volcanic ash spread across the skies of the planet, contemporaries lamented 1816 as ‘the year without a summer’. The Confederation of the Rhine too witnessed social unrest during the Restoration in post-Congress Europe , while in the long-term, technical advances in flood control and massive emigration from Germany to Australia , Canada , South America and the United States resulted. Controversially, Behringer expresses less concern with the enormity of the actual event than with the conscious decision of historians to ignore the well-documented consequences of climate change.

See Wolfgang Behringer, Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer. Wie ein Vulkan die Welt in die Krise stürzte, C. H. Beck-Verlag, München 2015, 3rd ed. München 2016.