Climates and Cultures in History

A Video Introduction from the Editors

Climates and Cultures in History will address the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of climatic variability in human history around the world.

Starting in 2024, it will publish articles — original research, reviews and opinion pieces — on all periods of human history. The journal aims to bring into conversation what disciplinary separation has fragmented — the expertise of all the historical sciences: archaeology and ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern history. We hope, by this integrative approach, to create a thesaurus of knowledge about cultural interactions with the climate system, from the paleolithic era to the present. This new Open Access journal from the publishers of Environment and History and Global Environment seeks to bring broader attention to historical climate research in general and to emphasise its relevance in the ongoing discourse about anthropogenic climate change today. It will be a forum for collaboration to flourish between archaeologists; human, historical and physical geographers; historians; and climatologists. In this collaborative spirit, we place particular emphasis on including the perspective of researchers from countries of the Global South, which still tends to be underrepresented in (historical) climate research. The journal’s scope is global, which means it welcomes studies on any part of the world, not only at the global scale, but also at regional and local levels.

The journal’s thematic scope will include, but not be limited to:

• Cultural and political history of interactions between human societies and climate (agricultural history, paleo-ethnobotany, disasters and extreme events, climate change and infrastructures, climate and the body / ‘race’ / gender, etc.).
• The impacts of climatic changes and variability on demography, societies, cultures and civilisations.
• The collapse, adaptation and resilience of civilisations.
• The history of ideas about human influence on climate, and about ‘climate’ and climate-related natural phenomena.

The journal is now open for Submissions. Authors may submit their articles via this website.  Those wishing to have a preliminary conversation with the editors may get in touch before 'officially' submitting. For details on how to do this, please refer to our current Calls for Papers.