TY - JOUR
T1 - Prudent peasantries
T2 - Multilevel adaptation to drought in early modern spain (1600–1715)
AU - Grau-Satorras, Mar
AU - Otero, Iago
AU - Gómez-Baggethun, Erik
AU - Reyes-García, Victoria
N1 - Funding Information:
The research leading to the results presented in this paper was funded by the former Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation through the CONSOLIDER SimulPast project (CSD2010-00034) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (FI-DGR2013). Authors would like to thank the staff of the Historic and the Municipal Archives of Terrassa, for their help and dedication. We also thank M. Borr?s for editing the maps presented. Feedback from the workshop ?At the intersection of disciplines: History of Science and Environmental History?, 8?9 June 2017, Universitat Aut?noma de Barcelona, where an earlier version of this paper was presented, is greatly appreciated. This work contributes to the ICTA Unit of Excellence (MinECo, MDM2015-0552).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The White Horse Press.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/2
Y1 - 2021/2
N2 - Climate change, being a product of industrialisation, can easily fuel the idea that adaptation to climate impacts is something new. Scholars of the past, how-ever, show that societies have dynamically and heterogeneously coped with climate variability and with recurrent and abrupt weather extremes. This research aims to explore climate adaptation in preindustrial societies taking into account different levels of social organisation. We argue that this multilevel perspective can enrich our understanding of the different strategies to cope with climate impacts in past societies. Archival research was carried out in the early modern villages of Terrassa and Sant Pere (Barcelona, Spain) to recon-struct the set of strategies to cope with recurrent droughts both at community and household levels. We found that peasant families developed a wider range of strategies than communities, but that many strategies used by households and communities overlapped, potentially generating a redundancy effect and fostering complex strategies operating through cross-level interactions. By studying past adaptation strategies with common taxonomies and detailed methodologies, our paper aims to improve interdisciplinary communication with research about the human dimensions of anthropogenic climate change.
AB - Climate change, being a product of industrialisation, can easily fuel the idea that adaptation to climate impacts is something new. Scholars of the past, how-ever, show that societies have dynamically and heterogeneously coped with climate variability and with recurrent and abrupt weather extremes. This research aims to explore climate adaptation in preindustrial societies taking into account different levels of social organisation. We argue that this multilevel perspective can enrich our understanding of the different strategies to cope with climate impacts in past societies. Archival research was carried out in the early modern villages of Terrassa and Sant Pere (Barcelona, Spain) to recon-struct the set of strategies to cope with recurrent droughts both at community and household levels. We found that peasant families developed a wider range of strategies than communities, but that many strategies used by households and communities overlapped, potentially generating a redundancy effect and fostering complex strategies operating through cross-level interactions. By studying past adaptation strategies with common taxonomies and detailed methodologies, our paper aims to improve interdisciplinary communication with research about the human dimensions of anthropogenic climate change.
KW - Adaptation
KW - Climate change
KW - Drought
KW - Multilevel analysis
KW - Preindustrial
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85099742554&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3197/096734019X15463432086964
DO - 10.3197/096734019X15463432086964
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85099742554
VL - 27
SP - 3
EP - 36
IS - 1
ER -