The Burning Earth
An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
One of The New Yorker's "Essential Reads" of 2024 • One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2024
"[An] epic exploration of human innovation and destruction." —Josie Glausiusz, Nature
A brilliant, paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, over the last 500 years.
In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Spanish silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.
The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images—in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The past 500 years have been defined by humanity's attempts to free itself from the constraints of nature, only for nature's constraints to have tightened like a noose, according to this impressive account from historian Amrith (Unruly Waters). Aiming to untangle how human beings' "creaturely quest for survival" came to so drastically shape Earth's environment, Amrith argues that over the past half millennium there has formed a "densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm." Ranging across the globe, Amrith tracks how extractive colonialism implemented by a small subset of elites led to enormous gains for some populations while others were enslaved and impoverished. He suggests that the "freedom over nature" that accrued to the populations of colonial powers over this period—longer life spans, better health, more freedom of movement—were generally at the expense of the colonized as much as they were the result of domination of nature, in ways both obvious (like the Transatlantic slave trade) and subtle (wetland railroad construction led to an influx of malaria in India). Amrith sees hope for a different path emerge with the environmental and human rights movements of the 20th and 21st centuries (though at this point humans will likely have to rely on yet more technological alterations to the environment to survive as a species, he asserts). It's an elegant and sweeping look at how humanity has brought itself to the brink.
