Here is a video of the Economic History Society's 2008 Tawney Memorial Lecture by Bruce M. S. Campbell entitled Nature as Historical Protagonist.
What role did natural environmental processes, both physical and biological, play in shaping the course of economic development over the last millennium and longer? Historical accounts often overlook the independent influence that natural agencies could exercise upon the supply of and demand for resources, via their effects upon the reproduction, health, and life expectancy of humans and the domesticated plants and animals required for subsistence.
Bruce Campbell explores the significant environmental component to the course of pre-industrial economic development, investigating the comparisons between the chronologies of prices, wages, grain harvests and the corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climactic variations, taking into consideration dendrochronology, the Greenland ice cores and the episode of the Black Death.
(HT: Oxonomics)
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