The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
£11.40£12.30 (-7%)
THE TIMES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023
A BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK FOR THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE AND FINANCIAL TIMES
A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK | AN INSTANT #2 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘Humanity has transformed the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history’ Financial Times
‘Vast, learned and timely work’ Sunday Times
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From the international bestselling author of The Silk Roads comes a major history of how a changing climate has dramatically shaped the development-and demise-of civilisations across time.
When we think about history, we rarely pay much attention to the most destructive floods, the worst winters, the most devastating droughts or the ways that ecosystems have changed over time.
In The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan, one of the world’s leading historians, shows that the natural environment is a crucial, if not the defining, factor in global history – and not just of humankind. Volcanic eruptions, solar activities, atmospheric, oceanic and other shifts, as well as anthropogenic behaviour, are fundamental parts of the past and the present. In this magnificent and groundbreaking book, we learn about the origins of our species: about the development of religion and language and their relationships with the environment; about how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus formed the origins of the bureaucratic state; about how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples; about how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history. All provide lessons of profound importance as we face a precarious future of rapid global warming.
Taking us from the Big Bang to the present day and beyond, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with humankind’s continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world.
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‘This is epic, gripping, original history that leaps off the page’ Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
‘All Historians aiming to tell a narrative face the problem of when exactly to start it. Only Peter Frankopan would go back 2.5 billion years to the Great Oxidation Event’ Tom Holland
A 2023 HIGHLIGHT FOR: BBC NEWS * SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE * FINANCIAL TIMES * NEW EUROPEAN * GUARDIAN * NEW STATESMAN * THE TIMES * THE WEEK * WATERSTONES * BLACKWELL’S
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by Paul Marshall
I’ll leave it for others more clever than me to heap praise upon this epic and important work.
But be warned, this book is very thick and very heavy. I’d describe it as being on the absolute limit of useable. It leaves dents in my hands and fingers after holding it in bed for a short while.
It’s difficult to complain too much as what choice did the publisher have?
Annoyingly, I will have to purchase a Kindle (or similar) and the Kindle version to enable me to finish this excellent book.
by User
Enormous book with a great sweep approach to world history and masses of telling detail.
by Jonathan Korshin
Makes history interesting!
by jon43jon
I like the book, it is worth reading. I don’t like the way he jumps from china to India to Europe. But have said that climate change has happened before and he explains this very well.
by simon beale
Having read Silk Roads I knew I would be in for a similar epic with The Earth Transformed. The author has a gift for telling stories on a global scale and is pushing that to the limit with this book. I was initially trying to keep track of the shifts and switches between civilisations but found this hard to keep track of and this is when I realised because I was thinking on too small a scale. This book comes into its own when you widen your conceptual sense and take a truly global view. Settlements, city states and nations are just parts of the stage on which this book is set. Examples are not there to tell the story of any one state, empire or peoples, but the wider planetary narrative.
The book is about how the people cope with the story the planet is telling. Humanities fluctuating fortunes when faced with changing climate and environmental conditions is what emerged as the central thread. The imagery of networks and connectivity appears often in the book, time and again these networks were being stress tested by the demands that were placed on it and those that were not able to respond fell, whilst others survived or flourished.
As a history teacher I will now be thinking hard about how to synthesise the messages from this book so that I can put it into my lessons.
by Robert Macdonald
I was brought up to think history was about monarchs, Generals and geniuses. And I always felt this wasn’t history. The Earth Transformed tells a meaningful global history – about people, societies and civilisations. As the author says, the environment (and especially climate and weather) isn’t just an actor on the stage that most histories ignore – it is the stage, and when the stage collapses (which it often does) the show can’t go on.
Arguing that climate has repeatedly brought down civilisations has become overly fashionable but this isn’t the line this book takes – societies collapse when they fail to respond to climate or prepare for adverse weather, and they are then replaced by more appropriate ones. Time after time, this is what we can learn from history. Time after time, we ignore the lesson.
The Earth Transformed has been criticised as lacking a clear and convincing central message. But this is exactly the point. History is messy. Human society is messy. Real life ain’t simple. It’s so refreshing to read a grown up book that doesn’t grasp for populist platitudes.
There are flaws in this book. Sometimes, the author’s love of history cause him to stray from his central theses. And in the final chapters, he seems unable to get across the magnitude of the impact of our current ‘Great Acceleration’ and how the risks we are exposed to now dwarf those of former civilisations. I also think he has missed an opportunity to draw out comparisons between our current predicament and those that human societies have faced in the past. So his very last chapter is less history and more environmental polemic (and therefore more derivative than it could be).
But it is nonetheless a monumental, sweeping, illuminating, intelligent, challenging, rewarding, masterful and astonishing achievement.
by Charlotte
Arrived promptly and in good condition.
by philcr99
Wow – this looked like the book I’d always wanted to read. Human history seen through a new lens – how climate and natural disasters shaped human history.
Unfortunately Peter Frankopan makes little concession to the ordinary reader, filling his text with obscure, technical language which may be appropriate for fellow professionals but not for the general reader. He starts with several chapters on prehistoric times where the evidence for anything is som thin an technical that little can be said wih any confidence. The book improves when we move into actual history and the author is clearly a man of huge erudition. Problem is: it;s just too big. He flits from China to Egypt to Mesoamerica too quickly often qualifying conclusions in a way that undermies their value. It needs to be clearer and simpler and if it can’t be – maybe this isn’t a book whose time has yet come.