The Burning Earth: A History

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.

Ever since innovations in agriculture, transportation, and medicine brought great freedom to vast numbers of people—the freedom to move, to dream, to create, to discover—our remarkable achievements in reshaping nature have allowed billions of humans to thrive. Yet every technological innovation has also empowered us to exploit each other and the planet with greater efficiency and cascading unintended consequences. Only recently have we had enough information to understand these impacts on a global scale—and to propose corrective action.

In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, genocide and eco-cide, human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese 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 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, 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.