*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. A 2023 HIGHLIGHT FOR: BBC NEWS * SUNDAY
TIMES CULTURE * FINANCIAL TIMES * NEW EUROPEAN * GUARDIAN * NEW STATESMAN * THE TIMES * THE
WEEK * WATERSTONES * BLACKWELL'S _______________ 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. 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
