History retold through the lens of the natural world

Twentieth-century French historian Fernand Braudel popularised the longue durée approach to history, examining events over the long term to uncover apparently imperceptible but evolving relationships between and within societies.

Oxford University historian Peter Frankopan hyperbolises this approach in his new book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. Rooted in environmental history, it covers all of time and attempts to piece together a vast number of interlinking aspects of humankind’s bonds with — and breaks from — the natural world.

Frankopan established his reputation with the 2015 book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, which re-evaluated the region spanning the east Mediterranean to west China, the northern Himalayas and Eurasia in terms of its critical role in the rise of human civilisations and ongoing modern-day influence.

“The Silk Roads are rising again,” he wrote, provocatively but also presciently given how Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine and China’s aggrandising policies are the dominant geopolitical forces today.

The Earth Transformed has a similarly challenging outlook. Humans have always lived in a world “of transformation, transition and change,” Frankopan writes, “yet the weather, climate and environmental factors have rarely been seen as a backdrop to human history, let alone as an important lens through which to view the past”.

His perspective is “untold” in the sense that it incorporates different branches of history, and fuses these with new insights made possible by data, statistical modelling, and scientific developments including genomics, carbon-dating techniques, and fossil study advances. Together, they give historians new ways of analysing and understanding even the extraordinarily long distant past.

Parallel causes

At 650 pages, the book is a complex behemoth. It suffers from two minor flaws. First, information overload drowns out critical points. Fleeting historical snippets sometimes veer in a half-dozen directions or more on one page — Dutch capitalism, Norse mythology, Po Valley famines, Spanish colonial overreach, volcanoes in South America and Southeast Asia.

What gets lost is the main implication of Earth’s evolutionary spasms, namely that incredible geological upheavals have formed the composition of the planet and clustered resources in distinct ways, influencing human survival and then our thriving, our movements, ambitions, all of our known history.

Indeed, Frankopan loses the drama of an early reference to recent studies that estimate oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere happened about 2.4- billion years ago, almost certainly through a combination of random bacterial, chemical, evolutionary, volcanic and planetary coincidences. Biologically, the first hominids appeared a few millions years ago, so “we are not just fortunate to exist as a species, but in the grand scheme of history we are new and very late arrivals”.

Second, occasionally Frankopan blurs the difference between cause-and-effect and correlation. In a one-page hodgepodge of cross-continental climate catastrophes during the 1630s, he notes that these alone cannot account for the 30-million hunger-related deaths at the time.

The continuous wars, plagues, revolts and pogroms of the 17th century made it, in general, one of the most dreadful times to be alive. And no, he says, the Akkadian Empire, the world’s first, did not collapse in about 2150BC due to climate change. Nor was the decline of Mayan civilisation directly attributable to this, as some historians have argued.

One of his seminal points, then, is that, throughout history, “extensive though the global climatic rearrangement was, it is important to underline that in many cases the unsettled and unusual weather conditions served to accentuate existing vulnerabilities rather than act as primary cause of disaster”.

But there are also many segments in which he illustrates the opposite. Albeit unsurprising, even pogroms against the Jews, for example in the 1320s in parts of Europe, are correlated to problematic growing season temperatures in the previous five years. About this, Frankopan says: “In other words, the worse the weather conditions, the greater likelihood that minorities would be attacked.” He may not be shifting his stance, but he seems to be hedging his bets across a range of causes of human misery or socioeconomic or political flux.

More definitively, and convincingly, he explains that many of the correlations are rooted in wondrous but staggering volcanic eruptions. The Thera-Santorini explosion about 1600BC was the largest in the past 5,000 years. Scarcely imaginable, he writes that it had the power of 2-million Hiroshima atomic bombs. It catalysed the decline of the Minoan civilisation of Crete, which reoriented Mediterranean societies and altered the political landscape of the ancient world, and caused huge ecological and environmental impacts across the globe.

Intriguingly, recent scientific studies prove its role in the evolution and dispersal of pathogens, including the smallpox virus. Smallpox claimed 300-million lives in the 20th century alone. It’s impossible to disagree when Frankopan writes that “it is hard to overstate the importance ... of the bigger picture of how events in the world’s natural history have had major long-term impacts that affected the world not just of the past but of the present too”.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t round this out by noting that Thera-Santorini has had at least 10 subsequent eruptions, most recently in 1950. It’s an active volcano, so at some unpredictable point in the future, might there be a similarly devastating global transformation erupting from the Aegean Sea?

Overall, Frankopan’s central theme and ideas position him in the environmental determinism camp: the planet — some 4.5-billion years in the making — is the paramount force, the driver of human history. To dispute this is to be wilfully ignorant of the immense forces of nature, of geology, of interplanetary dynamics. And yet, ‘we are!’ he implies regularly, becoming more strident towards the end of the book covering the post-Industrial Revolution period, and especially in the ultimate chapter, “On the edge of ecological limits”, which focuses on the last 30 years. We are now playing a dangerous game, as if daring Earth to transform again, even for the worse.

Stories move us, so The Earth Transformed may help more than bland scientific facts to wake us up. Who wants to read of COP27’s dismally ineffectual proceedings? And media fatigue has worn us down, dampening fury at the extinction of another species and dismay at raging fires and torrential floods that feature in almost every news bulletin. The author deserves credit for what is, disguised as a narrative of history, a science-based clarion call to change our attitude to the natural world.

Earth has transformed, inexorably and slowly, but sometimes cataclysmically. Frankopan has issued a challenge to humankind: can we transform, too, and fast?