Environments

The actions of early modern Europeans profoundly shaped global ecologies and set in motion forms of economic development which continue to affect environments today, but all in the context of a cooling, not a warming climate. The inclusion of Asia, the Americas and parts of the Middle East and West Africa coincided with new climate reconstructions for the period which show the mid-to-late seventeenth century to be a low point for global temperatures, as the Little Ice Age reached its coldest point during the Maunder minimum. The Columbian exchange was the most important environmental process in the early modern period, as it brought together what Europeans understood as two almost separate worlds, between which contact and biological transfer had only ever been small-scale and piecemeal. Deliberately introduced species such as cattle, sheep and domesticated horses thrived on American flora, which fundamentally changed American landscapes.