Bruce M. S. Campbell

This sprawling, demanding book focuses on what Bruce M.S. Campbell terms the period of the "Great Transition"—the roughly 200 year span between the 1260s and 1470s when pandemic disease and climate destabilisation caused by the shift from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age caused a profound shift in Eurasian societies and ecologies.

Successive chapters take in the rapid growth of Latin Christendom between about 950-1250, thanks to reliable crop yields; the post-1250 shock caused by increased climactic instability which caused repeated harvest shortfalls and improved conditions for epidemics and epizootics; the Black Death, both the first climactic irruption of the 1340s and the recurring waves of the 1360s and 1380s which were likely the ones which had far more dramatic impacts on long-term demographics; and the intersecting and various crises which continued to affect Europe until at least 1475.

Campbell is clearly most at home with the English agrarian records on which he's spent most of his career, but he draws on a vast array of European and Asian historical sources, together with contemporary scientific literature. His argument is built on everything from the mineral composition of stalactites in Chinese caves, to palaeogenomics, to charts for grain yields. (There are 78 figures alone.) The breadth of sources used is nothing other than deeply impressive, even if still largely Euro-Anglo-centric.

The close nature of Campbell's argument, together with the less than scintillating nature of his prose, means that The Great Transition is unlikely to find an audience outside of academia. Not all of his interpretations are fully borne out, I think, and new aDNA findings have already made some of Campbell's conclusions about the origins and spread of the Black Death obsolete. Yet the book is a very good example of how to balance an assessment of broad-scale climactic change and geographic contexts with an awareness of “the complexity of human actions and reactions” and “the autonomy of biological agents.” (In this, it also is a useful exemplar to set against a lot of pop "histories" which tell grand narratives that are just as sweeping as Campbell's, but which are ultimately much more reductive.) Highly recommended.… (mais)