Why would anyone emigrate to North America in the seventeenth century? Anya Zilberstein complicates our understanding in ... a short exploration of contemporary debates regarding the nature of North American climate and the question of how European and African peoples would adapt to life in the Americas ... A Temperate Empire is a useful contribution to our knowledge of how ... Read moreeducated men struggled to make sense of American weather as global empire undermined ancient theory ... Succeeds as a contribution to the wider literature on early modern empire and the fitful rise of science.
John L. Brooke, American Historical Review
Anya Zilberstein has offered an extraordinarily sensitive and textured treatment of the early modern discussion of climate and climate change in A Temperate Empire. She successfully combines the history of science and environmental history to provide an account that is relevant both to modern-day discussions about climate change and to early American environmental history ... Zilberstein's book is beautifully written and enjoyable, as well as rigorous and insightful.
James Bergman, H-Net
The lessons of this book are many and its deep history crackles with resonances in the present.
Adam Bobbette, The Times Literary Supplement
A Temperate Empire deserves the immediate attention of historians as a genuine-and highly successful-exercise in recovering historical origins of our climatological citizenship.
Vladimir Jankovic, author of Reading the Skies (Chicago, 2000) and Confronting the Climate (Palgrave, 2010), ISIS
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