The Burning Earth
A History
by Sunil Amrith
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Sep 24 2024 | Archive Date Aug 31 2024
Talking about this book? Use #TheBurningEarth #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
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.
In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn 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. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.
The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images—in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.
Advance Praise
"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. The Burning Earth will set you on fire." -Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
"A marvelously erudite and wide-ranging account of the steadily accelerating ecological transformation of the planet since the twelfth century. An indispensable contribution to both environmental and global history." -Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement
"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, Sunil 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." -Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
"A wrenching, clear-eyed reckoning with humanity’s extractive relationship to the natural world that plants seeds of insight on how we can shift to an ethos of regeneration and repair. Every page challenges us to conceive the future we want for the planet...and ourselves." -Kate Orff, author of Toward an Urban Ecology
"Memorable and mesmerizing. Sunil Amrith has gifted us a page-turner of a book, written with passionate lucidity. Historically deep and geographically generous, The Burning Earth dramatizes human freedom’s profound dependence on the health and integrity of our environments. Amrith’s capacious insights and his worldly perspective make this a standout title for anyone interested in the long arc of environmental justice" -Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
"Ranging from the Mongol expansion to contemporary climate change, Amrith has given us the most readable global environmental history yet. With an eye for the telling detail combined with a sense of the big picture, this book brings environmental perspectives together with such major world historical themes as empire, freedom and energy. A towering achievement and a joy to read." -J. R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324007180 |
| PRICE | $35.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 416 |
