The Burning Earth

Ranging from the Mongol expansion to contemporary climate change, Amrith has given us the most readable global environmental history yet. With an eye for the telling detail combined with a sense of the big picture, this book brings environmental perspectives together with such major world historical themes as empire, freedom and energy. A towering achievement and a joy to read

J.R. McNeill

The Burning Earth, which is nothing short of a history of the world, is as beautiful as it is indispensable, as breathtaking as it is devastating. It answers questions most of us have been too daft even to ask. It will set you on fire

Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

The Burning Earth is a marvelously erudite and wide-ranging account of the steadily accelerating ecological transformation of the planet since the twelfth century. An indispensable contribution to both environmental and global history

Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement

A devastating panorama of human folly, a poetic meditation on how the search for freedom from nature undermined the very conditions for life on earth. Beautifully written, Sunil Amrith’s global and long-term view is crucial to understanding the environmental predicaments we are in, and, perhaps, to restore a distraught world. A must read for anyone concerned with the state of the planet

Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton

A wrenching, clear-eyed reckoning with humanity’s extractive relationship to the natural world that plants seeds of insight on how we can shift to an ethos of regeneration and repair. Every page challenges us to conceive the future we want for the planet...and ourselves

Kate Orff, author of Toward an Urban Ecology

Memorable and mesmerizing. Sunil Amrith has gifted us a page-turner of a book, written with passionate lucidity. Historically deep and geographically generous, The Burning Earth dramatizes human freedom’s profound dependence on the health and integrity of our environments. Amrith’s capacious insights and his worldly perspective make this a standout title for anyone interested in the long arc of environmental justice

Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

An epic exploration of human innovation and destruction [which] examines how the poor and powerless have fought back — time and again — against those seeking to profit from the planet’s natural resources

Josie Glausiusz, Nature

Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth bristles with indignation... The history that Amrith covers is uncompromising, and he places the sins of environmental change on the insatiable greed of Europeans... [Amrith] is a scholar who writes with conviction

Peter Frankopan, The Spectator

[A] magisterial historical review [....] Amrith writes from an environmental history perspective, and with an impassioned sense of social justice, about a wide range of subjects, including agriculture, assassination, colonialization, disease, freedom, hunger, politics, pollution, slavery, urbanization, and war

Lawrence D. Meinert, Science