The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years

Books

Winner of the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award One of The New Yorker's "Essential Reads" of 2024 • One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2024 "[An] epic exploration of human innovation and destruction." -Josie Glausiusz, Nature 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 Spanish 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 ...