that moment of profound political rupture” (239). Wang recapitulates this theme in the conclusion, when she examines the present-day covers of Women of China, unrecognizable to the original editors as adver- tisements for consumption rather than for production, for the urban rather than for the rural, and for feminini- ty rather than for feminism. Finding Women in the State will be of great interest to historians of gender, of the revolution, and of the state. Its many contributions include probing what hap- pened to the Chinese socialist revolution and its vision of women “holding up half the sky.” In this way the study could go further and compare other promises made and broken, particularly to peasants and to work- ers. Were such trajectories similar or different, and why? In addition, comparisons could be made to previ- ous and other regimes; the Nationalist Party was also a revolutionary party that betrayed its woman suffragists in its inaugural convention in 1912. Does the imperative behind the “politics of concealment” lie in the Leninist party system, an authoritarian mode of government, or in Chinese culture itself? In her conclusion, Wang attends to the legacy and future of socialist feminism. Recounting the 2015 case of the Feminist Five—a group of activists detained for organizing an anti– sexual harassment campaign to commemorate Interna- tional Women’s Day—Wang describes a public re- sponse to their accounts of imprisonment: the invoca- tion of one of Xia Yan’s filmic revolutionary heroines, Sister Jiang. The readiness of such an allusion suggests the persistent power of socialist feminists’ ideals, even as a new generation of feminists may choose revolution over the state. DENISE Y. HO Yale University DAGOMAR DEGROOT. The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560– 1720. (Studies in Environment and History.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 364. Cloth $120.00. Over the past few years, the climate has come to be seen as a significant agent of historical developments. A plethora of recent studies have drawn connections be- tween various kinds of climatic fluctuations and out- breaks of human conflict throughout history. In line with research linking contemporary climate change and outbreaks of epidemic disease, scholars are suggesting that plague dynamics of the past were closely associated with particular climatic conditions. The climate has also been held responsible for dictating spatial and temporal shifts in premodern agricultural production and macro- economic performance—the dominance of the Amartya Sen “entitlements” and distribution paradigm increas- ingly obscured by an alternative view that pre-industrial famines were mainly a production issue (and therefore, a climate issue). Climate has also been linked with his- torical migration dynamics. Once upon a time, to be a historian and to be labeled “environmentally determin- istic” was simply uncool and to be avoided at all costs —hence an aversion to climate-related explanations. Fast-forward to today, however, with our contemporary concern for climate change, and throw in much more convincing paleoclimate evidence, and the notion of “nature as historical protagonist” is much more palat- able, it seems. Big books are now being written on tran- sitions, turning points, crises, and so on: Bruce M. S. Campbell’s “great transition” of the late Middle Ages was not a story of Malthusian population dynamics, Brennerian social property relations, or a commercial revolution; rather, it was a story of global climate change installing a new socio-ecological regime charac- terized by repeat epidemic activity and famine (The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World [2016]). The “crisis of the seven- teenth century” may have been characterized by a com- plex assortment of political, economic, social, religious, and demographic problems, but according to Geoffrey Parker, underlying this “global crisis” was a broader framework of climatic and environmental conditions as- sociated with the Little Ice Age (Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century [2013]). For Dagomar Degroot and his The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720, climate is also centrally placed— although in this case, climate is not associated with deg- radation and decline, but with (relative) success and prosperity despite difficult environmental pressures and challenges. That the coolest phases of the Little Ice Age occurred (roughly) simultaneous to the so-called “golden age” of the Dutch Republic—a time of economic and cultural vitality for very select parts of the Northern Netherlands—is not really an original insight, since the Dutch Republic has long been identified as an anomaly to the general crisis narrative, by the likes of Jan de Vries, Geoffrey Parker, Maarten Prak, and others. The point of originality in Degroot’s line of argumentation is that climate change linked to the Little Ice Age led to a set of environmental challenges and pressures that pushed the Dutch Republic into a set of active human AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2019 602 Featured Reviews Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/124/2/602/5426255 by guest on 13 April 2019