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The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Paperback – April 23, 2024

by Peter Frankopan (Author)

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A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A revolutionary new history that reveals how climate change has dramatically shaped the development—and demise—of civilizations across time

Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us.

Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have been met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and cutting-edge scientific research, The Earth Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Nature is not a harmonious, benign and complementary concept that preserves balance, for ecosystems have always been transformed and reshaped by many non-human forces.
Highlighted by 114 Kindle readers
Although cities occupy only 3 per cent of the earth’s land surface, urban areas accommodate more than half the world’s population.
Highlighted by 106 Kindle readers
The ENSO cycle of alternating warm El Niño and cold La Niña events is the dominant year-to-year climate signal on earth.
Highlighted by 82 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023: BBC NEWS, SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW EUROPEAN, GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, THE TIMES (LONDON), AND THE WEEK

"An essential epic that runs from the dawn of time to, oh, six o’clock yesterday."
—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

"Thanks to Frankopan and the specialists he cites, the triumphalist procession of steles and slabs and coins that have formed the building blocks of history will give way to a deeper consideration of what constitutes a historical source....Again and again the hindsight that Frankopan exploits so intelligently forces us to look afresh at things we thought we knew."
—Christopher de Bellaigue, The New York Review of Books

"Frankopan has brought all of this scholarly work together into a massive book that is comprehensive, well-informed, and fascinating. It has the intellectual weight and dramatic force of a tsunami....This is an endlessly fascinating book, an easy read on an important issue."
—Gerard DeGroot, The Times (London)

"Frankopan shows you how everything fits together...Vast, learned and timely work...The Earth Transformed is Sapiens for grown-ups....It holds lessons for a world grappling with rapid climate change caused by human industry."
—Dan Jones, The Sunday Times

"A dazzling compendium of global research....The value of this book is an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena—not dominators of the Earth but products of it."
—Adam Nicolson, Spectator

"The author succeeds in mastering a seemingly impossible challenge, distilling an immense mass of historical sources, scientific data, and modern scholarship that span thousands of years and the entire globe into an epic and spellbinding story. Humanity has transformed the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history."
—Walter Scheidel, Financial Times

"Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and scientific research, The Earth Transformed will reframe the way we look at our future."
—JP Faber, Coral Gables Magazine

"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, author of Dominion

"Frankopan demonstrates an impressive mastery of anthropological, historical, and meteorological literature, and his scrupulously evenhanded analysis carefully notes uncertainties in scientific and historical evidence. Elegant and cogently argued, this illuminates an age-old and urgently important dynamic."
—Publishers Weekly,starred

"A scholarly assessment of the long-standing human habit of altering the environment to increasingly devastating consequences....The author negotiates the difficult matter of environmental determinism well....A deep, knowledgeable dive into environmental history."
—Kirkus

"Mapping historical, anthropological, and economic narratives against mountains of climate data, Frankopan correlates periods of instability to shifts in weather patterns, ocean currents, and seismic events. And if the human species has frequently survived existential peril—the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, volcanic mega-eruptions—the threats to our collective future are massive and unprecedented....Propelled by Frankopan’s global scope and interdisciplinary legwork, the resulting synthesis is ambitious, nervous, and impressive."
—Booklist

About the Author

PETER FRANKOPAN is professor of global history at Oxford University. He is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. He lives in Oxford.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
The World from the Dawn of Time
(c.4.5bn–c.7m bc)

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void ...

—Book of Genesis, 1:1

We should all be grateful for dramatic changes to global climate. Were it not for billions of years of intense celestial and solar activity, repeated asteroid strikes, epic volcanic eruptions, extraordinary atmospheric change, spectacular tectonic shifts and constant biotic adaptation, we would not be alive today. Astrophysicists talk of habitable regions around stars that are not too hot and not too cold as being in the ‘goldilocks zone’. The earth is one of many such examples. But conditions have changed constantly and sometimes catastrophically since the creation of our planet around 4.6 billion years ago. For almost all the time that the earth has existed, our species would not and could not have survived. In today’s world, we think of humans as architects of dangerous environmental and climate change; but we are prime beneficiaries of such transformations in the past.

Our role on this planet has been an exceptionally modest one. The first hominins appeared only a few million years ago, and the first anatomically modern humans (including Neanderthals) around 500,000 years ago. What we know of the period since then is patchy, difficult to interpret and often highly speculative. As we get closer to the modern day, archaeology helps us understand more reliably how people lived; but to know what they did, thought and believed we have to wait till the development of full-writing systems around 5,000 years ago. To put that into context, accounts, documents and texts that allow us to reconstruct the past with nuance and detail cover around 0.000001 percent of the world’s past. We are not just fortunate to exist as a species, but in the grand scheme of history we are new and very late arrivals.

Like rude guests who arrive at the last minute, cause havoc and set about destroying the house to which they have been invited, human impact on the natural environment has been substantial and is accelerating to the point that many scientists question the long-term viability of human life. That in itself is not unusual, however. For one thing, our species is not alone in transforming the world around us, for other species of biota—that is to say, flora, fauna and microorganisms—are not passive participants in or simple bystanders to a relationship that exists solely or even primarily between humans and nature. Each is actively involved in processes of change, adaptation and evolution—sometimes with devastating consequences.

This is one reason why some scholars have criticised the idea and the name of the ‘Anthropocene’, which prioritises humans into ‘a distinguished species’ that has claimed the right to identify what is and is not wild, to classify ‘resources’ as ones that can be used—sustainably or otherwise. Such, argue some, is the ‘arrogance that greatly overestimates human contributions while downplaying those of other life forms almost to the point of nonexistence’.

For around half the earth’s existence, there was little or no oxygen in the atmosphere. Our planet was formed through a long period of accretion, or gradual accumulation of layers, followed by a major collision with a Mars-sized impactor—which released enough energy to melt the earth’s mantle and create the earliest atmosphere from the resultant exchange between a magma ocean and vapour that was anoxic, that is to say, lacking in oxygen.

The earth’s biogeochemical cycles eventually resulted in a radical transformation. Although there is considerable debate about how, when and why oxygenic photosynthesis occurred, evidence from organic biomarkers, fossils and genome-scale data suggests that cyanobacteria evolved to absorb and take energy from sunlight, using it to make sugars out of water and carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen as a by-product. New models suggest that 1 to 5 billion lightning flashes that occurred per year on early earth may have been the source of large volumes of prebiotic reactive phosphorus that played an important role in the emergence of terrestrial life.

Around 3 billion years ago—if not earlier—enough oxygen was being produced to create ‘oases’ in protected nutrient-rich shallow marine habitats. Whether because of chemical reaction, evolutionary development, sudden superabundance of cyanobacteria, volcanic eruptions or a slowdown in the earth’s rotation (or a combination of all five), atmospheric oxygen levels accumulated rapidly around 2.5–2.3 billion years ago, resulting in an episode known as the Great Oxidation Event. This was a key moment that paved the way for the emergence of complex life as we know it.

It also led to dramatic changes in climate, as rapidly increasing oxygen reacted with methane, producing water vapour and carbon dioxide. Alongside the effects of a supercontinent being formed from the collisions of landmasses, the earth’s greenhouse was weakened, leading to the planet being covered completely in ice and snow. Changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, known as the Milankovitch cycle, may also have played a role in this process. So too might giant meteorite impacts which not only threw up debris into the atmosphere that blocked the sun’s light and heat but also played an important role in the formation of the continents. The glacial episodes may have been weaker or stronger over the course of several hundred million years, but in general the effect of ‘Snowball Earth’ was so dramatic that some scientists refer to this period as a whole as a ‘climate disaster’.

This process was precarious and complex, and is the subject of considerable advances in current research. As with later glaciations, however, it resulted in profound changes for the planet’s plant and animal life. One outcome appears to have been the evolution of small organisms into larger sizes, capable of moving at faster speeds to compensate for the high viscosity of cold seawater. It has recently been suggested that the formation of 8,000-kilometre long belts of ‘supermountains’ may have played a role in the rise of atmospheric oxygen and in stimulating biological evolution as a result of phosphorus, iron and nutrients being deposited into oceans as mountains eroded over the course of hundreds of millions of years.

The fossil record of complex, macroscopic organisms begins with the Ediacara Biota period which started 570 million years ago and which saw at least forty recognised species developing into multicellular animals that were symmetrical—presumably helpful for functions such as mobility. It marked a period of extraordinary diversification in the variety of animals living in the oceans and in their evolution, development and adaptation, with some creatures like trilobites developing respiratory organs on their upper limbs.

Near the end of the Ordovician period, around 444 million years ago, a sudden cooling, perhaps triggered by tectonic shifts that produced the Appalachian mountains, led to sharp falls in temperature and initiated shifts in deep ocean currents, as well as declines in sea level that shrank habitats for marine planktonic and nektonic species. That cooling produced one pulse of extinction; another came when temperatures moderated, sea levels rose and ocean current patterns stagnated, with a resultant sharp fall in oxygen levels. Traces of mercury and indications of significant acidification suggest that volcanic activity was a key factor in the second stage of a process that ultimately brought about the extinction of 85 per cent of all species.

As the moon used to be much closer to the earth—perhaps half the distance away that it is today— these forces were considerably stronger and therefore had a greater impact on the earth’s climate and also perhaps on its wildlife: recent modelling suggests that big tidal ranges may have been responsible for forcing bony fish into shallow pools on land, thereby prompting the evolution of weight-bearing limbs and air-breathing organs. The moon played a role not only in the transformation of the earth, in other words, but also in the development of life on this planet.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (April 23, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 944 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593082133
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593082133
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.98 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.06 x 1.72 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #107,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #76 in Human Geography (Books)
- #97 in Climatology
- #170 in Environmental Science (Books)

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bill

The Author's Dilemma (Unjustified Complaints)

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2023

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The author has, I think, tried to strike a delicate balance, both in terms of content and form. There is a repetitive approach to introducing a topic as though climate were the only factor, and then retreating from that position to provide a more nuanced presentation that puts climate change in the mix, if not always at the forefront of the narrative.

In terms of form, there are several poor reviews here that complain about the decision to place the chapter notes online for download. (For the bitter reviewer who could not find them, they are there. I just downloaded them. Perhaps you misread the web address. It contains theearthtransformed, not simply earthtransformed.) At any rate, those who rail at the author for making this decision would no doubt also rail at the author if this volume were another 200 pages in length, with one-fourth of the volume comprised of chapter notes.

That seems like a lose/lose proposition for the author. The book is obviously well researched and, although I have a little difficulty with the jump from generalization to specificity in certain discussions, this is an important book and a welcome addition to our understanding of history. It reminds me very much of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything", another important read.

11 people found this helpful

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Desert Reader

A Wonderful Explanation

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2023

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A very well-written explanation of the unrelenting devastation and death that has been, and continues to be, humanity’s only path. The progress and pattern of ecocide is detailed as so predictable that the book can almost seem monotonous at times. Yet, the author skillfully helps us confirm civilized Homo sapiens as an inevitably inept, bureaucratically inclined, greedy, power-hungry, self-infatuated, super predatory species.

A very good book.

5 people found this helpful

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Art Shapiro

News for the climate oracle

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2023

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Oscar Levant said of Leonard Bernstein that he had made a career of discovering musical secrets that had been well-known for hundreds of years. This nearly 700-page book contains almost nothing at the conceptual level that was not in Lamb's great work "Climatic History and the Future" (1977). What is new is the data revealed by methods developed or improved since Lamb's day, as enumerated in the author's Introduction. The book should, then, be viewed as an updating and perhaps a partial replacement for Lamb, albeit less well-organized and -written than the original.
Frankopan has consulted a very large number of sources--so many, in fact, that rather than add 200 pages of endnotes and bibliography to this already ponderous work, the citations are posted and the reader directed to their url. That is probably the wave of the future for encyclopedic scholarly works; get used to it.
Inevitably, a few errors have crept in. For me the most egregious was a badly-mishandled discussion of mosquito-borne disease on p.358. The two most important genera of disease-vectoring mosquitoes are Aedes and Anopheles. Each has a set of associated pathogens, and the sets are mutually exclusive. Frankopan says Aedes vectors malaria and Anopheles vectors yellow fever. This is exactly backwards. (Actually, he seems to think both genera carry both diseases. They don't.)
The index runs to 28 pages, but as is so frequent nowadays, it is inefficient and incomplete. Consider 1816, the "Year without a summer," caused by the pall of ejecta hurled into the stratosphere by the catastrophic eruption of Tambora in 1815. The term "year without a summer." though very widely used in the literature, does not appear in the text and thus not in the index. If you know the offending volcano was Tambota you could look it up in the index, but you wouldn't find it. The reason is that all the volcanoes mentioned in the text are aggregated in the index under "volcanic activity." If you figured out that idiosyncrasy you'd then be home free. But what if you knew 1816 was the result of a volcanic eruption but didn't know the name of the volcano? You can get to the right page by looking under "famine"--the result of the year without a summer--and picking out the page citations corresponding to the text narrative, which is chronological. They would be in Chapter 19 (1800-1870). You would eventually get the right pages, 455 ff. But how many readers would be that resourceful?
The handling of wildfire as a climatic epiphenomenon is even worse--there isn't any. The Plague of 1665 was ended by the Great Fire of London in 1666, but none of that is in the index. (The global decline of plague has been attributed, somewhat controversially, to the displacement of the black rat Rattus rattus by the Norway rat, R. norvegicus, which is less effective as a plague vector. BTW, the discussion of plague alludes to but does not explain the supposed role of the siege of Caffa in its introduction to Europe (p.311). Many of us learned this perhaps-apocryphal story as Gospel truth. Frankopan gives a different but kindred story centered on Alrxandria. To return to fire: there is no mention of the Chicago fire of Oct.8, 1871, or the great Peshtigo (WI) fire of the same day, which was arguably the biggest wildfire in North American history (possibly supplanted by 2023's taiga fires in Canada?). Vegetation ecologists used to argue over whether or not fire should be considered part of the climate (for purposes of identifying the causes of succession), It cetainly deserves more attention in this book than it gets.
An oddity: On p.522 Frankopan quotes Lazar Kaganovich on the glories of the Moscow subway, F. noting parenthetically that it was built by slave labor, including Jews. All of this has little relevance to the subject matter of the book, but F. is plainly unaware that Kaganovich was the token Jew in Stalin's Politburo.
Anyway, I am glad to have an updating of Lamb but I am inclined to put Frankopan in the same club as Leonard Bernstein. Of course, ecological determinism in human affairs has a long pedigree, from Montesquieu to Wittfogel to Jared Diamond.

15 people found this helpful

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Twin

Perfect Christmas gift for hubby

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2023

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My husband has wanted this book for a while - he is a scientist. Great gift for Christmas.

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T. M. Sell

Interesting but badly written

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2023

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There's a lot of good information here if one is willing to wade through the author's frequently endless sentences. He's just not a strong writer here. He also claims that climate has been ignored as a factor in human/world history, when there are many respectable books that examine changes in climate as an important factor in world and human events. None of them have quite this book's scope, to the author's credit, but he's hardly the first to take this subject on. Meanwhile, and this is not the author's fault, the kindle translation consistently combines the word "I" with the word that follows, so that "I was" is rendered Iwas and so on. Overall, an important book; it's just a slog to read.

12 people found this helpful

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RaJaH

this book reveals the climate future unless we act

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2023

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This is a thorough discussion via well regarded historian of climate change throughout the millennium. The difference between then and now is that in historic times climate change, but not everywhere in the world. Currently climate change is affecting everyone everywhere.

5 people found this helpful

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Howard Mcpherson

Waited a long time

Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2023

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The print copy of the book just came in this afternoon and it looks great. I will start reading it tonight. The bibliography is 212 pages (not in the book) but is available from the publisher. Many of the references will require a good university library for access. Includes 13 pages of maps in the print copy

27 people found this helpful

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Mary-Claire van Leunen

OCR failure

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2024

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I think this book is probably very good, but it's been mangled by Optical Character Reading to the point where I cannot force myself to read it no matter how interested I am in the content. I do not understand why Amazon imposes a "return window" on a book like this. I acquired it, I paid for it, now I cannot read it because of utterly incompetent OCR. Please give me my money back, Amazon.

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Abraham

Very little analyses

Reviewed in Mexico on February 8, 2024

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It is a long bramble of citation notes, very few real dates and very little discussion that is original.

tom

Well done. Bu you needed much better editing

Reviewed in France on November 21, 2023

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Very good but too verbose and not always tightly relevant to its stated purpose. Many rabbit holes could have been left unexplored without weakening arguments or coherence.

Arun

Superb account indicating that Nature is Supreme

Reviewed in India on October 28, 2023

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This is a fantastic and captivating read with true hallmark of Peter Frankopan which only he can write. A Collector’s Delight and a book to be kept on the shelf, visible and to be read again.

RSS

Important livro. A ler sem falta.

Reviewed in Spain on June 24, 2023

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Gostei de tudo, incluindo a rapidez no envio.

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Robert Macdonald

Astonishing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2023

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I was brought up to think history was about monarchs, Generals and geniuses. And I always felt this wasn't history. The Earth Transformed tells a meaningful global history - about people, societies and civilisations. As the author says, the environment (and especially climate and weather) isn't just an actor on the stage that most histories ignore - it is the stage, and when the stage collapses (which it often does) the show can't go on.

Arguing that climate has repeatedly brought down civilisations has become overly fashionable but this isn't the line this book takes - societies collapse when they fail to respond to climate or prepare for adverse weather, and they are then replaced by more appropriate ones. Time after time, this is what we can learn from history. Time after time, we ignore the lesson.

The Earth Transformed has been criticised as lacking a clear and convincing central message. But this is exactly the point. History is messy. Human society is messy. Real life ain't simple. It's so refreshing to read a grown up book that doesn't grasp for populist platitudes.

There are flaws in this book. Sometimes, the author's love of history cause him to stray from his central theses. And in the final chapters, he seems unable to get across the magnitude of the impact of our current 'Great Acceleration' and how the risks we are exposed to now dwarf those of former civilisations. I also think he has missed an opportunity to draw out comparisons between our current predicament and those that human societies have faced in the past. So his very last chapter is less history and more environmental polemic (and therefore more derivative than it could be).

But it is nonetheless a monumental, sweeping, illuminating, intelligent, challenging, rewarding, masterful and astonishing achievement.

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