The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith

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 vastly expanded production of food, our remarkable achievements in reshaping nature have allowed billions of humans to exist and thrive. Yet every technological innovation has also empowered us to exploit each other and the planet with devastating brutality. In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, genocide and eco-cide, human freedom and planetary costs. His environmental lens provides an essential new way of understanding war as massive reshaping of the earth through global mobilizations of natural resources, including humans; and explains patterns of migration as a consequence of environmental harm. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images and rich archival resources.