The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years

"This is a magisterial work and quite extraordinary. The title undersells it because it goes back much farther than the last 500 years. It shows that you can’t tell history—whether it’s the history of the past 50 years or the past 500 years or the past 1000 years—without paying attention to the role of the environment. The environment is not something that’s happening on the side of history. They’re intertwined, and you can’t separate them out. The book shows this really compellingly. It illustrates how events that we might think about as completely unrelated were connected through the environment. For instance, Amrith mentions research suggesting that the European invasion of the Americas that started in 1492 with Columbus contributed to the Little Ice Age that lowered temperatures all over the world. Perhaps the freezing over of the Thames in the 1600s was caused in part by the conquest of the Aztec empire on the other side of the Atlantic a century earlier. The second really big thing the book does is show how today’s ideas about the good life can’t be separated from dominating the environment. Over the last 500 years, we began to think that we could conquer the environment rather than simply living with it. Ultimately, this view has been behind the environmental catastrophes that we’re seeing today. The Burning Earth shows in particular the role of fossil fuels in shaping our ideas about freedom, and in helping some of us realise those ideas. It looks at this contradictory situation where fossil fuels, and the transformation of the world they enabled, allowed a great flourishing for some people around the world. Fossil fuels became connected to what we think it means to be free, but they came at a terrible cost, and they didn’t bring freedom to everybody."

"Another important nonfiction prize is the annual British Academy Prize. This is a prize we particularly value at Five Books because it aims to narrow the divide between academic work—the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences—and writing that is enjoyable to read and accessible to a general audience. The prize is also quite internationalist in outlook, aiming to promote a broader understanding of the world and between different countries and cultures. This year’s winner was an environmental history of the past 500+ years, The Burning Earth , by Sunil Amrith , a professor of history at Yale who also has an appointment in the Yale School of the Environment. Despite the tough topic, this book is fun to read because of its range—you learn, for example, about the Mongol expansion and how many horses each of Genghis Khan’s horde had, amongst many other historical details. The ultimate message of the book is that “the environment is not something that’s happening on the side of history. They’re intertwined, and you can’t separate them out,” historian Rebecca Earle, one of the prize’s judges, explained to me. “The book shows this really compellingly.”"