Economic History, Climate, and the Environment is a Joint Center for History and Economics initiative to encourage new histories of economic life and the environment. Our starting point is the need to "understand and reduce the loss and damage" caused by climate change (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 3/CP.18.) The initiative will be based at the Cambridge CHE, at CHE-P, and at the Harvard CHE. The Joint Center is deeply grateful to Carol Richards, the late David K Richards and the Richards family for their continuing support.
On 12 February 2026, a new essay was published on our 1800 Histories website by Emma Rothschild, a micro-history of Tonopah, Arizona, from a methane plume in the desert to solar power plants and data centers.
On 4 February 2026, a new essay was published on our 1800 Histories website by Melih Cevik on Del Rey, California. A super-emitter event reveals a story rooted in agriculture, industry, energy, and a community grounded in history as it continues to hope for growth.
On 20 January 2026, Julian Giordano published a new essay on our Visualizing Climate and Loss website exploring how satellite data and photography reveal the hidden geographies of methane emissions in coal and gas regions.
On 19 February 2026, Mariia Koskina will be speaking at the Reconsidering Soviet Studies Seminar, organized by PhD candidates in Slavonic Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Her talk is titled "Siberian Rivers Working for - and Against - Communism."
The group, based at the Cambridge Centre and organised by Mariia Koskina and Paul Warde, meets weekly at the Centre. On 18 March 2026 the group will be reading Environment and Infrastructure Challenges, Knowledge and Innovation from the Early Modern Period to the Present, edited by Giacomo Bonan and Katia Occhi.
Based at Sciences Po, this research seminar on the history of science, technology and the environment is concerned with environmental politics and economics, in Europe and the world, since the eighteenth century.
Pairing satellite and aerial data with photography, Julian Giordano has created an online exhibition which reveals the places where invisible methane emissions occur in the coal and gas fields of southwestern Pennsylvania - the historic energy heart of America. Documenting ten high-emission sites, the exhibit shows how greenhouse gas emitters mark the landscape, functioning as both engines of the local economy and contributors to global climate change.
On 8 September 2025 Mariia Koskina published an essay on the 1800 Histories website. Known for metallurgy since the Bronze Age, the Ural Mountains have long been Russia's industrial 'backbone,' a legacy embodied by Novotroitsk, a former Soviet steel town. As a 'monotown,' it reveals how the command economy clung to heavy industry and outdated open-hearth furnaces, providing jobs while trapping the area in pollution and residents in uncertain futures.
On 1 May 2025 Paul Warde contributed a blog post, 'The rise of coal'. It is part of The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure's 60th anniversary series, 'Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about....'.
On 24 October 2024 Paul Warde contributed a blog post, 'The Organic Economy', on the energy economy before fossil fuels and explaining the reasons why the fossil fuel revolution was so consequential. It is part of The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure's 60th anniversary series, 'Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about....'.
Isobel Akerman has contributed a blog post on the Environmental History Now website titled 'How to Wild an Environmental Historian'. Environmental History Now is a volunteer-run online platform for women, trans and/or nonbinary people in environmental history.
Marking the tercentenary, we are pleased to share a series of essays over the next weeks by Emma Rothschild about Adam Smith and climate change - "Adam Smith, Climate and Loss."
Ifeosa Anwulika Nkem-Onyekpe has contributed a new essay on our Visualizing Climate and Loss website regarding the devastating floods in Southern Nigeria and their socioeconomic consequences.
In an essay on our Visualizing Climate and Loss website, Isobel Akerman explores the historic process of cliff erosion in Christchurch Bay, and reflects on the causes of, and responses to, this visible loss.
Paul Warde discusses two very different books that responded to The Limits to Growth report of 1972, but that while radically differing politically, tell us much about what was shared across debates about the environment in the 1970s.
Paul Warde contributed a new essay caption to the Invisible Histories website where he discusses the connections between tools, work and our understanding of skill in economic history.
Paul Warde, Isobel Akerman et al.
The Harvard Center is pleased to introduce 1800 Histories. The project is an effort to understand the local circumstances of more than a thousand sites - the ultra-emitters of methane gas - that are of outsized importance in the causes of climate change.
An undergraduate course at Harvard taught by Emma Rothschild and Victor Seow explored historical approaches to climate change. This website showcases student work from the course.
The question is somewhere, somehow in everyone’s consciousness: how is it possible to live with loss, and with unknown, unimaginable changes in climate? Visualizing Climate and Loss is a platform for thinking with history about change, loss, and daily life -- and for thinking about what is to be done.
Through an intimate history of Tiree, Paul Warde tells a story of how apparently distant industrialization transformed the lives of islanders, and their relationships with local resources and the sea, eventually scattering the community around the globe.
Harriet Ritvo, Emeritus Professor of History at MIT, visits the Cambridge Centre on an annual basis to work with students and researchers and participate in events in Easter term, including most recently the workshop on Extinction.
This project explores how the historical study of energy use and transformation can widen perspectives on economic, social, and environmental processes in the past. It also serves as an ongoing repository for data on historical energy use, and a forum for the historical discussion of energy in all its forms in a global and comparative context.
