review of DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE, The Empire of Climate. A History of an Idea, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2024

The title of this book takes inspiration from a sentence of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law, “The empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires”. It singles out the relevance of climate in the fate of human civili- sations, up to our days characterised by policies geared to reduce our impact on it. Climatic forces have often been seen as a primary cause of social change, engendering a kind of environmental determinism. The increasing availability of data on historical weather and its impact on species helps the adoption of such perspective. Livingstone says that those histories are dominated by envi- ronmental determinism and reductionism, leading to a futurizing of history. He introduces the interesting notion of epistemological slippage meaning the transfer of predictive authority from one domain of knowledge to another with- out an appropriate theoretical or analytical justification.