Frankopan, Peter. The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
As modern anxieties about climate change and the fate of humanity accelerate, it should come as no surprise that scholars have increasingly focused on those same issues in their exploration of past eras of human development. The past half-century has also brought with it a host of new ways of measuring the climate of the past, from ice cores to pollen samples, that make such histories not just possible but necessary in accounting for the ways ecological change has influenced our evolution, whether biological, political, or economic. I’d come across works that applied this approach to specific eras of history, whether incidentally like Barry Cunliffe’s Europe Between the Oceans or as its raison d’etre like Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome. It was only with Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed, however, that I found a history that applied it to all of human experience thus far.
While his original specialty was the Crusades, in the past decade Frankopan has made a name for himself as an author of Big History, starting with his exploration of Central Asia in The Silk Roads (the very first book review here on Concerning History, in fact). In The Earth Transformed, Frankopan takes an even larger, global, view, analyzing how the Earth’s climate has influenced human history from hominids to the present day–and vice versa. Like so many of those other works using a similar approach, the integration of these ecological trends into more familiar political and economic narratives feels eminently natural (no pun intended) and offers simple, compelling explanations for some of history’s more mysterious or apparently arbitrary developments. Yet unlike those other previously reviewed works, Frankopan demonstrates admirable restraint in how far he pursues ideas of ecological determinism. Rather than treating humanity as simply slaves to the inevitable forces of climate and resulting plenty, scarcity, or disease, The Earth Transformed instead lays these out as factors that perhaps restricted nations’ and individuals’ options, but did not entirely take away their agency to adapt and survive—or not.
Where Frankopan’s narrative did not quite live up to my expectations, however, was in his choice of what to cover and what not to pay as much attention to. With a title like The Earth Transformed and with the cyclical nature of how we have influenced our home planet even as it has influenced us, I had hoped for a more thorough discussion of all the myriad ways humanity has adapted and shaped our environment, from irrigation to the agricultural revolutions and even more modern technology such as air conditioning and alternative energy. Instead, Frankopan focuses on political history, most notably the interaction between crop yields and regimes’ stability and capacity for dynamic action. Compelling history, to be sure, just not all I had personally thought the narrative could have explored.
What The Earth Transformed does analyze, however, is not just fascinating but a necessary work of scholarship for our own times. Frankopan himself admits that the current climate crisis in large part inspired his work, and for all that “debates” swirl around whether global warming is or is not caused by humans (it emphatically is), one thing should be clear after reading: those that fail to adapt to climate change, no matter its origins, do not long survive. It’s a lesson we should all take to heart in the coming decades.