Was There a 'Tambora Crisis'? Linking volcanic impacts and early nineteenth century history

Abstract

Historical interactions of climate and society are receiving intense attention. In this context, impacts of the 1815 Tambora eruption have been suggested as the cause of a global crisis with long-range repercussions. This thesis evaluates the merits of these claims, focusing on the issues of migration from the British Isles and the Kingdom of Württemberg, the famine in the Yunnan province in Qing China, and the first cholera epidemic originating in Bengal in 1817. These three topics serve as a prism to discuss how we can develop a model of climate-society interactions that is neither social nor climatically determinist, the potential and limitations in tracing the impacts of global climate change and in which ways this revision in history studies can qualify historiography more generally. Related to this are the challenges of writing global history large in spatial scale that easily gives precedence to material drivers of change – in this context the climate – that suppresses human agency. This thesis argues that the adoption of tools handed down from the cultural theories coupled with a conceptualization of global history as a perspective, not solely defined by spatial scale, may provide a way out of this determinist trap where synchronicity has the appearance of causality. This way, culturally specific particularities are not subsumed into teleological narratives of how societies succeed or fail due to changing conditions in the natural environment and allows us to gain insight into the complex and dynamic processes at the interface of humans and nature.