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 ------ 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. 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. ----- 'This is epic gripping original history
that leaps off the page' 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 A 2023 HIGHLIGHT FOR: BBC NEWS *
SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE * FINANCIAL TIMES * NEW EUROPEAN * GUARDIAN * NEW STATESMAN * THE TIMES *
THE WEEK * WATERSTONES * BLACKWELL'S
