Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations [Paperback]

Brian Fagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2009

In 1999, few people had thought to examine the effects of climate on civilization. Now, due in part to the groundbreaking work of archaeologist Brian Fagan, climate change is a central issue. Revised and updated ten years after its first publication, Floods, Famines and Emperors remains the definitive account of how the world’s best-known climate event had an indelible impact on history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Before 1997, the name "El Niño" was unknown to most ordinary folks. Meteorologists, oceanographers, commercial fishers, and weather buffs knew of this periodic climatic anomaly, but to the everyday person on the street, a few degrees' difference in the Pacific Ocean's temperature was irrelevant. Then one of the most powerful El Niños in recorded history caused bitter freezes in Europe, brutal snowstorms and floods in western North America, and deadly droughts throughout the South Pacific. People sat up and took notice as a relatively tiny change in oceanic temperature resulted in death and destruction in many parts of the globe.

Brian Fagan examines the social effects of El Niño and other powerful weather phenomena in Floods, Famines and Emperors. He gives plenty of examples of how cultures have adapted to stressful weather and the ways in which climatic alterations have changed the course of history. From droughts in ancient Egypt to monsoons in India, the far-reaching effects of meteorology's most cantankerous kid have deeply affected the way humans live in the world. Illustrated with useful maps and diagrams, Floods, Famines and Emperors is a clear, fascinating look at an aspect of climate studies--and of El Niño--mostly ignored by science. --Therese Littleton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Scientific American

The aberrant and often devastating weather patterns brought on by El Niño are by now familiar. According to Fagan, they have had a less recognized effect. "There is a strong correlation between unusual climatic shifts and unusual historical events." He cites the fall of the Old Kingdom in ancient Egypt, the Moche society of Peru and the Maya of lowland Central America as examples. Other societies--the Anasazi of the American Southwest and today's San foragers of southern Africa's Kalahari Desert--have survived the impact of severe climatic stress. Fagan asks pass, he answers, have decisive centralized leadership, or develop innovations that increase the carrying capacity of the land, or, if they can, simply pack up and move elsewhere. Those that fail are less adaptable because their thinking is too rigid for the circumstances. Fagan describes the mechanisms and effects of El Niños, La Niñas and other far-reaching meteorological events and then discusses how several societies have coped with them. Could severe climatic change topple a modern civilization? "No one force--overpopulation, global warming, or rapid climate change--will destroy our civilization. But the combination of all three makes us prey to the knockout blow that could." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Revised Edition edition (February 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465005306
• ISBN-13: 978-0465005307
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #321,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Fagan was born in England and studied archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum, Zambia, from 1959-1965. During six years in Zambia and one in East Africa, he was deeply involved in fieldwork on multidisciplinary African history and in monuments conservation. He came to the United States in 1966 and was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1967 to 2004, when he became Emeritus.
Since coming to Santa Barbara, Brian has specialized in communicating archaeology to general audiences through lecturing, writing, and other media. He is regarded as one of the world's leading archaeological and historical writers and is widely respected popular lecturer about the past. His many books include three volumes for the National Geographic Society, including the bestselling Adventure of Archaeology. Other works include The Rape of the Nile, a classic history of archaeologists and tourists along the Nile, and four books on ancient climate change and human societies, Floods, Famines, and Emperors (on El Niños), The Little Ice Age, and The Long Summer, an account of warming and humanity since the Great Ice Age. His most recent climatic work describes the Medieval Warm Period: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. His other books include Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society and Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World and Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age gave birth to the First Modern Humans. His recently published Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind extends his climatic research to the most vital of all resources for humanity.
Brian has been sailing since he was eight years old and learnt his cruising in the English Channel and North Sea. He has sailed thousands of miles in European waters, across the Atlantic, and in the Pacific. He is author of the Cruising Guide to Central and Southern California, which has been a widely used set of sailing directions since 1979. An ardent bicyclist, he lives in Santa Barbara with his life Lesley and daughter Ana.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent synthesis of climatic concepts and civilizations, March 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Floods, Famines, And Emperors: El Nino And The Fate Of Civilizations (Hardcover)

As a professional meteorologist, routinely faced with questions on El Nino and La Nina, I found this book both interesting and enjoyable. Like other Fagan books, it was well written and easy to read.

Meteorologists and Climatologists will enjoy this book, with simple and historical treatments of Monsoons, ENSO, and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Those with a weather interest will enjoy this book, especially the first 100 page or so.

Finally, the book connects the climatological phenomena with civilizations. The climate impacted all civilizations and may have weakened them, contributing the their evolution or demise. These concepts are supported in the text and fit well with the concept on human evolution in Ian Tattersall's book "Becoming Human-Evolution and human uniqueness".

This book supplements some of the ice age material in the earlier Fagan book, "The Great Journey-The peopling of ancient America". This book is both easy to read and understand, well worth the cost.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Water, water, everywhere and nowhere, March 14, 2004

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Floods, Famines, And Emperors: El Nino And The Fate Of Civilizations (Paperback)

According to Brian Fagan, the phenomenon known as El Nino has abruptly entered our collective awareness. That's a good thing, since its effects have a long, and often disastrous reach. It is not, he contends, the only issue to consider in climate impact. It has been "over-hyped" by media. The issues go beyond freak storms and harsh droughts. Humans have confronted weather throughout their evolutionary history. How society copes with global weather impact is Fagan's real concern. He's collected a wealth of information in this well written account. There is much to learn from this book, which includes some intriguing
surprises.

Comfortably divided into three major themes, Fagan opens with an explanation of El Nino's "discovery". What had seemed to be freak weather events proved to have an underlying pattern. The El Nino Southern Oscillation [ENSO] is an eastward moving body of warm Pacific Ocean water. The warmth blocks the flow of the Humboldt Current moving from Antarctica along the South American coast. Fish die or depart, with birds duplicating the pattern. Fagan stresses that the effect of that warm cell has global reach and has roots deep in time. Pharonic Egypt felt its impact, perhaps contributing, if not causing, social upheaval and even a new philosophy of rule by those absolute rulers.

How society and its rulers deal with abrupt weather change is the focus of the second part. As an anthropologist, Fagan is conversant with ancient societies. He examines the Andean Moche people who engineered extensive irrigation systems to catch feeble rainfall. With El Nino, rainfall changes from feeble to fabulous and the Moche watched their canals being flushed away. The following famines broke the power of the Moche aristocracy and the culture collapsed. A similar fate occurred to the Maya, whose rigid social pattern prevented them from coping with crop loss. However, the Anasazi people of the American Southwest, long skilled in desert agriculture, had a different method for dealing with drought. A loose, flexible society encouraged sharing of resources, then departure when the soil failed. Fagan overturns the long-held view that the Anasazi "mysteriously" disappeared. He contends they simply dispersed.

In the final section, Fagan relates some historical climate events such as The Little Ice Age and the Sahel drought. He examines the short-sighted policies that have exacerbated the human impact of such events. Over expansion in good years leaves no flexibility for addressing the needs of bad times. Governments must avoid superficial solutions in the face of knowing climate will generate surprises. Better planning scenarios are required for land occupation and use. Although it's been said before, Fagan urges better understanding of what is sustainable. That, of course, means more research and the application of political will derived from its results. While that may curtail some short-term profit gains and force revision of some cultural noms, it's the survival of the species that's at stake.

Fagan's easy writing style mustn't undercut the value of this book. Enhanced with good maps tied nicely to the text and an outstanding bibliography make this book required reading. Weather, after all, is part of the human condition everywhere. We all need to understand better its impact, and cheap jokes about El Nino aren't part of that comprehension. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good to read; a nice beginning, May 3, 2002

By 

Quickhappy "quickhappy" (Big city, big country) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Floods, Famines, And Emperors: El Nino And The Fate Of Civilizations (Paperback)

To be honest, I enjoyed this book far more than I anticipated. Fagan is a smart archaelogist, and does not reduce human history to weather; rather he shows how weather can influence politics, religion, agriculture, and economics. Fagan could have made this point more clearly: weather can sometimes be influential; it's not determinative.

Fagan offers a good direction for archaelogists and historians to head; more serious works would do well to take up Fagan's challenge to analyze historical weather patterns. It'll be a tough go, but well-worth the trouble.

One of the book's strongest chapters is Chapter 11, showing how French colonial rule in the Sahel helped to impoverish and starve peoples living there, while increasing desertification. Here, he echoes the theme of the vastly superior _Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World_. This latter book, by Mike Davis, is one of the most important books of recent decades. Where Fagan fails to consider structural inequalities and human suffering as a result of El Ninos, Davis fully succeeds. The books make for some nice contrasts (I assigned both to my college students). Turn to Davis, after you've had fun with Fagan.