2000, Basic Books, 246 pages

Brian Fagan is my favorite contemporary mainstream author of non-fiction. The Little Ice Age is the fifth of his books I have read. He correlates climatic and historical events to a certain degree, focusing mainly on wars and does so from the false perspective of the mainstream: believing in three now demonstrably false things:

-1. That man is more powerful than the sun and caused the brief global warming from 1850 through 2000. That trend has since reversed and we are again in a wetter, cooler period such as our ancestors of the Plantation Era lived through.

-2. That massive starvation and death caused by British land enclosures were necessary evils fueling the great good of abstract economic progress.

-3. That the English troops sent to Ireland during the potato famine were sent to stop crime, when in fact they were sent to remove foodstuffs from Ireland in a genocidal holocaust of elite economic intent to starve out that most hated race.

As an excellent historian, Fagan serves the establishment lens even as his information undermines it. For example, the hysterical cult of main-made global warming is artificially founded on the deletion of the Little Ice Age from the hysteria model of thought.

Fagan begins with pointing out that after a half century of increased storminess and cooling across Europe, that the hammer came in the form of rain. An ice age does not start with ice, but with cooling water, with a deluge. Just as corn crops across three U.S. states were ruined by the excessive rains of the past few years, the grain crops of late medieval Europe were ruined in a deluge that marked the beginning of 550 years of mostly cooler conditions than the Medieval Warm Period. While the Medieval Warm Period’s end halted the building of cathedral’s in their tracks, its end, and the attendant disasters that spelled miserable doom for millions, also seems to have given birth to modern mass economics, including its foundation stone, chattel slavery of millions of Europeans: roughly 2 million in Africa, 3 million in North America and many tens of millions on the European mainland, including some 3 million Hungarians alone and countless Russians.

It is of great interest to this writer, that 1850, the last year of The Little Ice Age was effectively the end of the Plantation Era, which would falter for good in 1864, to be replaced by mass industrial economics and police states. Private police forces to enforce the enslavement of unpaid minors in Pennsylvania were legalized in 1865. Without any of this knowledge and the rosy-hued glasses of perpetual linear economics, one can forgive Fagan for extolling the good fortune of land enclosures to develop more efficient agriculture, as he winks away millions from history without noting where they went. For Holland and England’s advanced agricultural methods threw millions out of work. So, as peasants and serfs died in their tens of suffering millions across the continent, the half dozen millions of the Low Countries and the British Isles that were thrown out of work, were sold into American bondage, where the lethality rate ranged from 60 to 90%. According to Fagan’s account most of these folk just happily died and the lucky few got to homestead in the Utopian American Colonies, when in reality they were worked to death, raped and murdered in North Africa and North America. The British government never committed an act to stop the abduction of its poor coastal dwellers by the Barbary Pirates, as the death or removal of the poor was always to the benefit of the elite in an age of growing agricultural efficiency partially necessitated by the cooler climate. The Americans, recently come out of slavery, and possessed of almost no military resources, ended the Barbary Menace on their own as soon as the young nation barred importation of slaves in 1804, even as the massive militaries of Napoleonic Age Europe looked away.

The story of The Little Ice Age is very enlightening as to the brutal nature of the subsistence agriculture that was transported to America in the Plantation Era. Fagan gives many a date and detail of truly horrific events, such as a storm that killed 100,000 in Holland in 2 days, sand dunes that buried a farming community in Scotland, the infamous Year Without a Summer, the tyranny of grain over the civilized poor [a condition generated by civilization] and the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland in 1350, people who either sunk at sea or sailed to North America when they were cut off from Christendom by the encroaching ice.

I am using Brian Fagan’s masterful work to develop a chronology of climate related events that effected and may even have shaped or created Plantation America, for every disaster that befell the poor or middling folk of the Northwestern Europe was a boon of cheap labor for use as human speculation in Plantation America.