Climate Change and the Course of Global History : A Rough Journey (Paperback)

Introduction: growth, punctuation, and human well-being; Part I. Evolution and Earth Systems: 1. The court jester on the platform of life; 2. Human emergences; Part II. Domestication, Agriculture, and the Rise of the State: 3. Agricultural revolutions; 4. The Mid-Holocene and the urban-state revolution; 5. Human well-being from the Pleistocene to the rise of the state; Part III. Ancient and Medieval Agrarian Societies: 6. Stasis and growth in the epoch of agrarian empires; 7. Optimum and crisis in early civilization, 3000?500 BC; 8. A global antiquity, 500 BC?AD 542; 9. The global dark and middle ages, AD 542?AD 1350; Part IV. Into the Modern Condition: 10. Climate, demography, economy, and polity in the late medieval-early modern world, 1350?1700; 11. Global transformations: atlantic origins, 1700?1870; 12. Launching modern growth: 1870 to 1945; 13. Growth beyond limits: 1945 to present; Coda. A rough journey into an uncertain future.