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
