Werezi Books

How the story of Noah''s Flood was central to the development of a global environmental consciousness in early modern Europe.

Winner, Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood, Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature, humanity, and their intersecting histories.

Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness. Following Noah''s Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation.

Nuanced and beautifully crafted. After the Flood reveals the surprisingly long history of the idea that humanity is capable of transforming nature on a global scale—an idea commonly assumed to be a twenty-first-century insight. Making use of an impressive range of archival sources, Barnett''s scholarship is original, wide-ranging, and erudite.
—Deborah R. Coen, Yale University, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale

After the Flood offers a provocative, erudite history of environmental thinking, global imagining, and Christian universalism between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Barnett''s wide-ranging research on how Catholics and Protestants debated a biblical understanding of human sin and natural catastrophe between Europe and the Americas reminds us that climate change was a subject forged on the fault lines between knowledge and faith in the early modern world. An excellent contribution to global intellectual history.
—Paula Findlen, Stanford University, editor of Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World

In this dazzlingly original and deeply researched book, Lydia Barnett demonstrates how debates in early modern Europe about the causes of the Deluge stimulated arguments about anthropogenic climate change. This is a major contribution to the growing literature on the historical roots of the Anthropocene. It is also an important reminder that the religious imagination grappled with planetary scale long before the advent of earth system science.
—Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, The University of Chicago, coauthor of Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin''s Lake District

Laying waste to received environmental ideas, After the Flood delivers a strikingly original account of a seemingly recent notion: that humans are responsible for the earth''s destruction. This extraordinary book weaves together imperial expeditions, theological wars, and early scientific networks to rediscover the natural and human history of a vulnerable planet.
—John Tresch, The Warburg Institute, University of London, author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon

An incisive and thorough examination of how complex, natural philosophical discourse developed around Noah''s Flood in the early modern period. This is cultural and intellectual history at its best, and it should attract a wide readership.
—Dániel Margócsy, University of Cambridge, author of Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age

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After the Flood : Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe

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