In the original dustsheet. Green binding with gilt title on the spine.

*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.

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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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. I wanted to buy everyone I know a copy’ 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

Book Description

A major history of how a changing climate has dramatically shaped the development-and demise-of civilisations across time, from the international bestselling author, Peter Frankopan

Most people can name the influential leaders and major battles of the past. Few can name the most destructive storms, the worst winters, the most devastating droughts. In The Earth Transformed, ground-breaking historian Peter Frankopan shows that engagement with the natural world and with climatic change and their effects on us are not new: exploring, for instance, how the development of religion and language and their relationships with the environment; tracing how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples; scrutinising how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus formed the origins of the bureaucratic state; and seeing how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history. Understanding how past shifts in natural patterns have shaped history, and how our own species has shaped terrestrial, marine and atmospheric conditions is not just important but essential at a time of growing awareness of the severity of the climate crisis.

Taking us from the beginning of recorded history to the present day, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with humankind’s continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world.

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published by Bloomsbury in 2015, was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and remained in the top 10 for nine months after publication. It was named one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ 2010-2020 by the Sunday Times. The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019.