"Offering important new historical understandings of human responses to climate and climate change, this cutting-edge volume explores the dynamic relationship between settlement, climate, and colonization. The contributions gathered here consider a wide range of interrelated topics, among them the use of scientific evidence in historical research, the physical impact of climate on agriculture and land development, and changing understandings of climate, including the development of "folk" and government meteorologies. They reveal Australasia to be a remarkably varied and fertile area for analyzing cultural responses to climate as well as the wider social ramifications of historical climatic events"--