The Burning Earth

Sunil Amrith has given us the most readable global environmental history yet, a towering achievement and a joy to read. "The Burning Earth" is 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. It will set you on fire.

This book presents 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, 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.

Memorable and mesmerizing, Sunil Amrith has gifted us a page-turner of a book, written with passionate lucidity. In this paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet and the planet has shaped human history, Amrith intertwines the stories of environment and empire, of genocide and eco-cide, and of the expansion of human freedom and its costs.

Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he examines the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railways and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against 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. He also reveals the reality of migration as a consequence of environmental harm. The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit is joined.