The most consequential effect of the frigid weather, Blom argues convincingly, was to disrupt the harvest, especially the grain harvest. It led to a fundamental shift in the social order across Europe, and beyond. The Little Ice Age amounted to "a long-term, continent-wide agricultural crisis," as Blom writes. Grain harvests did not return to their previous levels for a hundred and eighty years. That affected everything about how society worked. Before this moment in European history, society was largely organized along feudal lines. The bulk of the population consisted of peasants, living on land owned by a lordly overclass. Town life, meanwhile, was dominated by restrictive guilds, and, in Blom's description, it "valued social capital–class and family standing, trustworthiness, competition–but did not encourage anyone to reach beyond his station." This settled order, which had lasted for centuries, was overturned. At first, there were panics and uprisings, food riots and rebellions, and a spike in witch trials–because, in a pre-scientific world, the idea that witches were responsible for failing harvests made as much sense as any other explanation.

Over time, however, larger structural shifts emerged. In the basic bargain of feudal life, a peasant kept one part of his harvest for himself, put one part back into the ground for the next year's harvest, and gave the last part to his feudal lord. When peasants had no surplus grain, this system collapsed. If local crops were failing, trading at a distance, to bring goods from farther afield, was critical. Money, and the ability to buy and sell with cash or its equivalent, took on a larger role. Cities with a culture of trade especially benefitted from this shift. The preëminent example in "Nature's Mutiny" is Amsterdam, which went from being a sleepy backwater of the Habsburg Empire to a thriving, economically dynamic center of rapidly expanding commercial networks, with a population that grew tenfold in just over a century.

Here we see the birth of the idea that markets, and the rules of markets, have supremacy in human affairs; we also see how the new dispensation offered opportunities to a new breed of ambitious, ruthless, commercially minded man. Amsterdam was the home of one of the world's first big exploitative overseas businesses, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), or V.O.C. Blom tells the story of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a V.O.C. official who burned down the Indonesian city of Jakarta and then led an expedition to punish traders on nearby islands who had broken the V.O.C. monopoly on nutmeg by selling to English and Portuguese merchants. Coen executed the merchants, killed fifteen thousand islanders, and sold the survivors into slavery. His feats in Indonesia would not have been possible, he told the company directors, "had not the Almighty fought on our side and blessed us." For true believers, God and the rules of markets were becoming inseparable–a conflation that, Blom argues, was taken to justify the exploitation of both people and natural resources and would lead us to our contemporary moment of environmental crisis.

This is a sweeping story, embracing developments in economics and science, philosophy and exploration, religion and politics. Blom delivers much of his argument through compressed, beautifully clear life sketches of prominent men. We meet the philosopher (and retired soldier) René Descartes, the mage and proto-scientist John Dee, the essayist Michel Montaigne, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, the excommunicated Jewish philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, the encyclopedist Pierre Bayle, and the great painter Rembrandt van Rijn, who both depicted and embodied the new human landscape of Dutch economic transformation.

In the course of "Nature's Mutiny," therefore, we travel a considerable distance from the subject of unusually cold weather. Too far, a reader might think, for Blom's argument to be regarded as a case conclusively settled. But it wouldn't be fair to "Nature's Mutiny" to see the issue of proof so starkly. It is a book about a new economic system and the philosophical and cultural trends that accompanied it; climate is central to the story that it tells, but the connections don't aim for the solidity of algebraic logic. Rather, Blom is seeking to give us a larger picture that is relevant to the current moment. His book is about links and associations rather than about definitive proof; it is about networks and shifts in intellectual mood, about correlations as much as causes. Despite that, Blom's hypothesis is forceful, and has the potential to be both frightening and, if you hold it up to the light at just the right angle, a little optimistic. The idea can be put like this: climate change changes everything.