“This brilliant, insightful, and important book reveals the deep-seated links between climate, capitalism, and civilization. Livingstone is on top of his game as he moves from early ideas about the climatic determinants of health and wealth to the politics of imperial control, representations of national character, modern economic development, and the pursuit of war, to end with our own horrified recognition of likely global collapse. There could be no better scholarly guide to thinking about the cultural meanings of climate and its history.”—Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place“This book represents a most important benchmark publication. Livingstone brilliantly embraces both depth and breadth of subject matter with a clever and insightful scholarly interrogation of the ways in which climate as an idea has been adopted, adapted, and appropriated.”—Georgina Endfield, University of Liverpool“There are two serious mistakes that can be made when judging the influence of climate on human affairs. One is to ignore it completely; the other to grant climate excessive explanatory power over our minds, health, wealth, and misfortunes. In The Empire of Climate, Livingstone shows with erudition and clarity how, in our current climate-obsessed condition, we are failing to learn from our past about the grave cultural, political, and ethical dangers that follow from this latter mistake.”—Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge“This is the magnum opus of one of the world’s leading historians of environmental ideas and the distillation of decades of research. Spanning antiquity to the Anthropocene, Livingstone offers compelling genealogies of how Western thinkers have conceptualized the linkage between the physical environment and climate on the one hand and human beings on the other. The Empire of Climate is both historically rich and pointedly pertinent as we map humanity’s relationship with the planet now and into the future.”—Robert J. Mayhew, editor of Debating Malthus: A Documentary Reader on Population, Resources, and the Environment“A masterful and exemplary overview of the impact of thought about climate on our sociopolitical life.”—Nicolaas A. Rupke, author of Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography