The Burning Earth: A History

by Sunil S. Amrith

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

An accessible, harrowing history of our planet: what we've done to it, where we're headed, what we can do to save it.

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

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 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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324007180
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/24/2024
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History and Professor of the Environment at Yale University. He is the author of five books and recipient of multiple awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the 2024 Fukuoka Prize.

Editorial Reviews

"[An] insightful survey of the long human struggle to escape environmental limitations…Whether the casting off of planetary bonds is literal or figurative, the prospect is delicious, and as Amrith so convincingly shows, it has animated the powerful for more than a thousand years. Yet the costs of the attempt are steep, and they are ever harder to escape."

The New York Review - Michelle Nijhuis

"Written with passion and insight, this is a highly readable grand narrative illustrated by vignettes from across the globe."

New Statesman Best Books of 2024 - David Reynolds David Reynolds

"Beautifully written… Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth takes us on a gloomy and bleak tour of how, in the name of progress, Western empires made a mess of everything."

Jacobin - Michael Ledger-Lomas

"Sunil Amrith’s chronicle is as compassionate as it is riveting. A Yale professor and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, the author moves seamlessly from how global conquest and war reshaped Earth from 1218 onward, to fascinating cultural analysis... to a resolute call for integrating our own vulnerable “creatureliness” into a road toward repair."

NPR - Neda Ulaby

"A vital addition to human historical texts and to climate nonfiction."

Book Riot - Erica Ezeifedi

"The history that Amrith covers is uncompromising."

The Spectator - Peter Frankopan

"In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation [and] recognizes the inseparability of environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors."

The New Yorker

"As beautiful as it is indispensable, as breathtaking as it is devastating. It answers questions most of us have been too daft even to ask. The Burning Earth will set you on fire."

Jill Lepore

"From Potosi to Johannesburg to Baku, the cycle of exploitation and extraction repeat throughout history and throughout this book… Indeed the magnitude of death and suffering of human and non-human animals is hard to comprehend. And when you take the long view, with Amrith as guide, it becomes clear that this pattern that keep repeating must be stopped… As a historian, Sunil Amrith provides readers with a narrative that spans continents and centuries, calling out exploiters with compassion for the exploited. And if all history is environmental history, we all are authors of this next critical chapter."

EcoLit Books - John Yunker

"Both dizzying and deracinating, but also, even in its grimness, quite thrilling… Amrith’s panopticon-like vision is one we need to adopt as we must assume responsibility for the health of the planet."

New Statesman - Kathleen Jamie

"This bleak, stunningly written book shows that the other side of the coin called progress is destruction. Amrith writes like the finest novelist, and his grasp of a mind-boggling expanse of material is deeply impressive."

New Statesmen Best Books of 2024 - Neel Mukherjee

"[An] expansive book... Amrith recognizes the inseparability of environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors."

New York Times

"Devastating and essential… In Amrith’s telling, human and environmental consequences are inseparable."

Priscilla Longn Scholar

"A wrenching, clear-eyed reckoning with humanity’s extractive relationship to the natural world that plants seeds of insight on how we can shift to an ethos of regeneration and repair. Every page challenges us to conceive the future we want for the planet...and ourselves."

Kate Orff

"A must-read history of our environmental crisis."

New Scientist - Michael Marshall

"A marvelously erudite and wide-ranging account of the steadily accelerating ecological transformation of the planet since the twelfth century. An indispensable contribution to both environmental and global history."

Amitav Ghosh

"Ranging from the Mongol expansion to contemporary climate change, Amrith has given us the most readable global environmental history yet. With an eye for the telling detail combined with a sense of the big picture, this book brings environmental perspectives together with such major world historical themes as empire, freedom and energy. A towering achievement and a joy to read."

J. R. McNeill

"A devastating panorama of human folly, a poetic meditation on how the search for freedom from nature undermined the very conditions for life on Earth. Beautifully written, Sunil Amrith’s global and long-term view is crucial to understanding the environmental predicaments we are in, and, perhaps, to restore a distraught world. A must-read for anyone concerned with the state of the planet."

Sven Beckert

"[The] pattern of conquest and carnage—pitting rich against poor, colonialist against indigenous, control of nature against the flourishing of the wild—has, tragically, been repeated countless times throughout history and across the globe. Amrith narrates this sorry (and sometimes inspiring) saga with flair, in his epic exploration of human innovation and destruction."

Nature - Josie Glausiusz

"The Burning Earth is a global history of the human destruction of the Earth in the pursuit of profit, as well as a sweeping account of how major technological advances have both improved and decimated human life. It’s a richly detailed story that tries to explain how we got to where we are today, so imperiled by the impacts of climate change, while also offering the possibility of new ways of flourishing on the planet."

Yale News - Lisa Prevost

"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."

The Next Big Idea Club

"[A] magisterial historical review… Amrith writes from an environmental history perspective, and with an impassioned sense of social justice, about a wide range of subjects, including agriculture, assassination, colonialization, disease, freedom, hunger, politics, pollution, slavery, urbanization, and war."

Science - Lawrence D. Meinert

"The Burning Earth is a welcome complement to important historical critiques of social injustice and inequality by authors like Howard Zinn and Eduardo Galeano."

Undark - Ramin Skibba

"Memorable and mesmerizing. Sunil Amrith has gifted us a page-turner of a book, written with passionate lucidity. Historically deep and geographically generous, The Burning Earth dramatizes human freedom’s profound dependence on the health and integrity of our environments. Amrith’s capacious insights and his worldly perspective make this a standout title for anyone interested in the long arc of environmental justice"

Rob Nixon

"Amrith recounts countless episodes of human greed, including the imperialism of Spain, Russia, China, Britain and others; the growth of South Africa’s gold mines, where the suffering of African miners helped to forge London as a financial centre; and the murders of modern-day environmentalists. We have reached planetary crisis… Only by understanding how we have treated the planet in the past can we understand our future."

Financial Times - Henry Mance

"In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation [and] recognizes the inseparability of environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors."

The New Yorker

"Devastating and essential… In Amrith’s telling, human and environmental consequences are inseparable."

American Scholar - Priscilla Long

2024-08-02
Broadly ranging history of how we arrived at “this point of planetary crisis.”

The human destruction of nature began a long time before the Industrial Revolution hastened the process along, writes Yale historian Amrith. Taking an appropriately long view, he considers such events as the British enclosure of the commons and forests, “landscapes on the margin of settled cultivation,” leading to wide-scale deforestation; the Mongol invasion of Central Asia and western Eurasia, with its horse-borne warriors scorning agriculture; conversely, the Chinese importation of rice from Indochina, where farmers had developed more than 100,000 varieties of the grass; and so forth. All of these events speak to want and greed. So do Amrith’s more recent cases, such as the indenture of Black South Africans to work the mines of the Transvaal, leading to a global trade in gold, the development of gold standard economies, and London’s emergence as a leading financial center; just so, the discovery of the Azerbaijani oil fields, which preceded the first American well by a decade, transformed the czarist economy and helped usher in centuries of fossil fuel dependence, exemplified by not just car-crazy America but also petrochemically addicted East Germany, with its mania for plastic goods that “embodied a future where anything was possible.” Today, Amrith writes, the contest for resources increasingly includes water. Gaining a handle on the planetary crisis is complicated by the fact that the wealthy nations, having got theirs, have precious little moral high ground to occupy in making the case that the poorer nations need to stop their clamoring demand for the stuff of wealth: cars, consumer goods, and perhaps above all meat (ecologically disastrous and fostered by government handouts), for “now it was others’ turn to eat.”

A far-reaching survey of the central role played by human needs and desires in the destruction of Earth.

Kirkus Reviews