What environmental history has to offer

Not unlike geoscientists, the job of historians is to provide a narrative and understanding of the past that can never be definitive. We can always question the selection and interpretation of the ‘facts’ upon which histories are built. Our views of the past inevitably tend to reflect contemporary preoccupations and prejudices.

In this regard academic history has seen an extraordinary evolution. For example, not that long ago in the UK education system, it was possible to be taught topics like the Tudor and Stewart eras of the 16^th and 17^th century several times over, at elementary, high school and university level focusing almost entirely on the political, i.e., the rulers, their governments, wars, diplomacy, etc. Ambrose Bierce, author of the satirical The Devil’s Dictionary, described such history as ‘an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.’

Luckily we have moved on. Nowadays the addition of cultural, social and economic studies is introducing to today’s students a much broader historical perspective. As befits our times, the influence of science and technology is also receiving more prominence; and the evolution continues. A case in point is the relatively new discipline of environmental history, and books like The Burning Earth: An environmental history of the last 500 years by Yale history professor Sunil Amrith, recently announced the winner of the British Academy Book Prize 2025. In scope, it ranks with Jared Diamond’s much-debated Pullitzer Prizewinning Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies, published nearly 30 years ago, in providing an outstanding, accessible global history framed by the turbulent relationship over time between human communities and the natural world.

Diamond’s book stemmed from his research among the remote tribes of New Guinea and turned out to have a significant embedded agenda. He was intrigued by a New Guinean man named Yali who asked why Europeans had more ‘cargo’ (material goods) than New Guineans. It led him to question why Eurasian and North African civilisations have survived and conquered others, and why local tribespeople – whom he considered every bit as intelligent and capable as himself – never developed writing, steel tools, centralised governments, or a complex society like that of the British colonists who annexed New Guinea in the 19^th century.

The book made a strong case (subsequently challenged) against the notion that Eurasian hegemony was due to any form of intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. He concluded that global inequalities were due to geographical and environmental factors, not race. In the broad pattern of human history he argued that Eurasia’s east-to-west orientation was more conducive to the spread of agriculture and domesticated animals compared to the Americas’ north-south orientation. Food surpluses enabled societies to move away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles allowing societies to develop writing, technology and organised governments. This in turn led to the development of the guns, germs and steel that were used to conquer other societies. The germ factor was significant. Ironically, living close to domesticated animals resulted in Eurasian societies unintentionally weaponising the immunities they had developed from a variety of diseases.

Amrith covers some of the same ground but his purpose is different. It is a superbly written contemplation of unfolding human history over the last 500 years from an environmental perspective charting the devastation and human injustice highlighted by centuries of colonialisation around the world starting with the Mongol Empire; the excessive exploitation of natural resources at any cost; catastrophic outbreaks of disease, and the enforced mass population migrations that have occurred.

Amrith recognises that everything appeared to change with the advent of fossil fuels beginning with coal in the 19^th century and petroleum in the 20^th century onwards. It seemed that anything was possible and that humans could finally take control of their environment. The upside has been the irrefutably improved prosperity and lifestyle experienced by many countries today, for the most part enjoying the freedoms of speech, worship, and freedom from want and fear (first articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941). The post-war independence gained by colonised people as the European-dominated world order has collapsed is also signficant. The downside during this period has been two world wars, continued exploitation of underdeveloped, resource-rich nations, ongoing mass migrations and of course, front and centre, our anthogenically-generated heating of the earth.

This is not an angry tract: for that the 2024 publication Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary,  executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, is a recent example of the genre. However, Amrith does have a message: ‘When I started out as a historian I saw environmenal concerns as secondary to political rights, economic empowerment and social justice. I now believe that they are inseparable.’ The book records as neutrally as possible a pattern over centuries of often shocking greed, savagery, spread of disease and climate change around the world and the interconnected harm to the environment. Particularly welcome is consideration of central Asian and Far Eastern civilisations too often neglected by western historians. Amrith’s account is brought to life with quotes from witnesses to events, and occasional illustrative references to contemporary fiction, poetry, and cinematic scenes. For example, during the horrors of the First World War that killed 10 million people, Amar Singh Rawat, in a hospital for wounded Indian soldiers in Brighton, England, wrote this moving observation: ‘The condition of affairs in the war is like leaves falling off a tree, and no empty space remains on the ground. So it is here: the earth is full of dead men, and not a vacant spot is left.’

When we reach the period of post-war optimism, sometimes referred to as the ‘great acceleration’ when technology, medical and other developments including space travel seemed to offer human mastery over the environment, Amrith offers a discursive chapter on some thought leaders of the time. Noting that, by the end of the 1950s, a mass of data was demonstrating how thoroughly human activity had affected forests and rivers, oceans and the atmosphere, he observes how three remarkable women of the era viewed the moral and political issues involved, and measures how far their judgments are valid today. We meet German-born American-Jewish philospher Hannah Arendt, author of The Human Conditon and The Origins of Totalitarianism who warned against destructive growth; celebrated American science writer Rachel Carson, who in the highly influential The Silent Spring, exposed the dangers of the pesticide DDT against vicious and misogynist opposition, e.g., the politican who asked ‘Why is a woman with no children so concerned with genetics?’ and finally Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi who was ahead of her times in proclaiming that global inequality had its origins in ecological violence and theft.

In a work that reviewers have called magisterial in its scope and ambition, the themes are numerous, many never seriously included in traditional European history teaching. For example, Amrith begins his narrative with the steppes grass which sustained the power of the nomadic Mongols. Each of the estimated 102,000 soldiers maintained at least five horses, this became unsustainable once invasion of neighbouring countries introduced them to agricultural production.

In the sweep of history, we encounter China’s rice revolution, the impact of abrupt climate change in the 14^th century and the concurrent Black Death estimated to have claimed between 30-60% of the population of Eurasia and the Middle East.

The European craving for sugar had huge consequences. Amrith locates the Portuguese boom and bust sugar plantations in Madeira in the 16th century, worked by local Guanches and imported slaved labour, as the precursor to the much larger-scale laying waste of local vegetation and forests in the Caribbean islands and vast tracts of Brazil in order to return maximum profit for investors. Between 1492 and 1866, 12.5 million enslaved human beings crossed the Atlantic, possibly as many as two-thirds associated with sugar production.

The decimation of the indigenous population in the Americas (by the sword of Spanish/Portuguese conquistadors and imported disease) is another tale of ruthless exploitation of resources as is the account of the later history of South African mine development, the inhumane treatment of the labour force and the astonishing rise of Johannesberg as a prosperous city.

Counterpoint to the promise of coal-fuelled industrialisation and rise of factories in the UK is an account of the choking smoke in Manchester. When we get to petroleum, its benefits and pollution, Amrith takes us first to Baku, Azerbaijan. It went from spectacular boom in the later 19^th century with notable international investors like the Nobel brothers (inventors of dynamite), the Rothchilds and Shell, to catastrophic fall due to labour unrest, international tensions and regime change.

Of the recurrent famines discussed in the book, rarely mentioned are those of Bengal in 1942-43 claiming three million lives, in Henan (two million dead) plus further millions in 1944-45 in Vietnam and Java.

What are we to make of these and many other reminders of our fragile environment? Amrith’s final chapter entitled Roads to Repair, while hopeful, offers little by way of solutions, but in truth that may not be the historian’s task.

Environment history, according to Donald Worster, an early advocate of the subject, ‘was … born out of a moral purpose, with strong political commitments behind it, but also became, as it matured, a scholarly enterprise that had neither any simple, nor any single, moral or political agenda to promote. Its principal goal became one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected environment and with what results.’

In other words, it is not down to historians to draw lessons from the past, always a suspect undertaking.

Our views of the past reflect contemporary preoccupations and prejudices.

Themes never seriously included in traditional European history teaching.