Historians of the early-modern period have embraced environmental history approaches to understand how environmental change and climatic shifts transformed regions during the period between 1500-1800. Growing access to a vast variety of data from multiple regions has also forced historians to grapple with the difficulty of designing studies that do not flatten the evidence into a single globalizing narrative yet provide an accessible analysis for non-experts. From the difficulties of studying mountainous and coastal regions with diverse microclimates, to understanding how weather phenomenon can drive wildly different patterns in regions around the world, to situating large data sets alongside fragmentary documentary evidence, climate history forces historians to embrace new and sometimes unfamiliar methodologies. This roundtable brings together historians focused on climate and ecosystemic change in the early modern period to discuss the challenges of how this work can be done more effectively. Recognizing the complications posed for all historians of the pre-modern world by multilingual but fragmentary archives, we will examine how to balance this already demanding work with interdisciplinary challenges of investigating climate and environmental history.

David A. Bello will survey some recent work on Chinese climate history and evaluate its significance for the integration of human cultures and non-human ecologies intended to address more systematically current analytical challenges of anthropocentricity, regional variation and interdisciplinary collaboration. Vera Candiani will examine the costs and benefits of the separation of environmental and climate history into a field of inquiry apart from political, economic and social history. She asks how can we avoid temporally telescoping historical environmental analysis – that is, examining ecosystems “before” and “after” events (such as conquest) in order to consider processes as they unfold? Archisman Chaudhury examines the ways in which climatic anomalies in the early modern Indian Ocean World (IOW) were part of a global story of climate crises. Coeval El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South Asia and island Southeast Asia, during the Little Ice Age (LIA), show sharp contrasts in impact of rainfall anomalies like droughts and floods, and reveal connections forged between these regions by the VOC (Dutch East India Company) that shipped enslaved labor affected by ENSO events. Chaudhuri will interrogate these processes to explore how macro- and micro-histories of human-environment relationships in the IOW appear in the context of climate crises. Bob Morrissey explores the history of wetland ecotone farmer-gatherers as a case study of Indigenous climate resilience in the mid-continent of North America during a period of considerable drought in the contact-era. He considers how recent reframings of mixed-agricultural societies across the globe give us a new window into the strategies of Indigenous Americans during these important climate changes.