Event

Climate sets fundamental parameters within which people organize their social existence. In this talk, Professor Brook will present a model of climate change in Chinese history and its impact on state and society during the imperial period. He will touch upon the preliminary findings he published in 2010 in the form of a chronological profile of climate anomalies through the Yuan and Ming dynasties from his book, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. In his research, Professor Brook has grouped the data to delineate nine multi-year periods, which he terms “sloughs,” a multi-year period when climate anomalies were powerful enough to compromise the survival of large numbers of people. A slough happens when several factors combine over several years in a sustained, deadly combination, constituting something like a unified proxy of extreme climate anomaly. Professor Brook will offer a fuller presentation of methods and findings by discussing further research on environmental stress in the Yuan and Ming in terms of sloughs and the revisions of those findings since the publication of The Troubled Empire. 

You can access a recent paper that correlates to this talk here.

Timothy Brook is professor of Chinese history in the History Department at the University of British Columbia and holds the position of Republic of China Chair in the IAR. He has published eleven books (nine of which have been translated into multiple languages) and one museum catalogue. He has also edited seven, in addition to serving as editor-in-chief of Harvard University Press’ six-volume History of Imperial China. Brook’s research ranges from economic history to human rights, and spans the Ming dynasty to the present. Among his more popular books are Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global Age and Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer. He was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2013.