“Thank God smoke is rising from the lofty chimneys,” wrote William Cooke Taylor on a tour of Lancashire in 1842. The Youghal man had learned from painful experience that “the absence of smoke” meant hopelessness and hunger. Coal was firing an industrial revolution, and what Charles Dickens called the “interminable serpents of smoke” that shrouded and choked the booming cities were a price worth paying. “A smokeless country,” wrote Sheffield smoke inspector William Nicholson, would have “purer air, clear skies, and more sunshine”, but it would be “a country of universal poverty”.
“Witness here,” writes Sunil Amrith in his new global environmental history, “the birth of an idea so powerful that it has reverberated around the world for almost two centuries: the idea that the degradation and sacrifice of nature is the necessary price of a human freedom from want.” Fossil fuels created what Scottish scientist Andrew Ure called a power “at the command of man… to which no limits can be assigned”, and they brought unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. Amrith charts how we burned the Earth to escape the chains of nature, but now with climate change causing catastrophic waves of floods and fires, our Promethean dreams are turning to ashes.
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Amrith’s previous book focused on how water has influenced the history of Asia, but here his elemental thinking is more global, albeit often with a welcome corrective to western-centric narratives. He powerfully explains the personal reasons behind his realisation that he could “no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place”. “Why,” his daughter asked him at age five, “do people destroy the Earth when it’s their only homeland?”
‘Too narrow a focus on carbon emissions’, Amrith warns, risks a ‘reductionism’ based on ‘a wilful ignorance of history’
Amrith tries to answer that question “from a position of empathy for the all-too-human dreams of fossil-fuelled escape that now lie in ruin”. For millenniums, human life was at the mercy of weather, disease and “a dependence on photosynthesis”. Much of our planetary pyromania came from the desire to escape the misery that such powerlessness often brought. But much too came from darker human traits: greed and the lust for power. Amrith argues that the late medieval and early modern world was defined by “a relentless imperial quest for land to settle and for resources to extract”, from Mexico to Mongolia. Ming dynasty bureaucrats summarised the imperial imperative: “to exhaust the land”.
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European attempts to catch up with the eastern empires would create a ‘metastasised’ imperialism that would create what we later called capitalism. In Madeira, the Portuguese burned the forests and trafficked enslaved people to grow sugar, a process they would repeat on a horrifying scale in Brazil. The “destructive” plantation economy model “simplified nature” because its exploiters did not care about the consequences, human or non-human. In Potosí, the furnaces of the Spanish “mines of death” burned night and day, feeding a global revolution in silver whose consequences “harmed every form of life”.
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The settler colonies of North America at first seemed less catastrophic than those focused on extraction, but slowly “fear gave way to ambition, ambition to megalomania”. Genocide, ecocide, and enslavement became means to pursue mastery of the vastness of the “New World”, creating what Alexis de Tocqueville called an obsession with “subduing nature”.
Amrith skilfully draws global threads together to show how the wildfire grew, endlessly making the unthinkable possible. Millions of enslaved people were moved across oceans; agricultural advances fed unprecedented population growth; and imperial profits fed investment in technology. Coal and the steam engine would create a seminal break from our ancestors’ relationship with the environment. This was a world of racial hierarchies and mass death, but it was also undeniable that life got better for millions, as science and trade increased the length and possibilities of life.
The scope of Amrith’s story is dizzying, and so it should be, as he repeatedly emphasises that this is a global history. The numbers can be numbing, and there is a danger that individuals get lost in such big pictures, but Amrith seeks out stories from Baku oilfields to Johannesburg mines, the trans-Pacific railroad to Siberian steppes, to humanise an age when migration “altered the face of the earth” through both force and choice.
Coal and the steam engine would create a seminal break from our ancestors’ relationship with the environment
Amrith’s grand narrative pauses to consider the efforts of French banker Albert Kahn, whose wealth came from African mines and Asian railways, to create “the Archives of the Planet”, a photographic archive of the world’s peoples (many being forced towards extinction). “To be able to see the whole planet”, Amrith writes, “was, in a sense, to possess it”. The reach of capitalism and imperialism seemed endless, and “the most privileged people in the world… began to think that the human battle against nature could be won… that natural limits no longer hindered their quest for wealth and power”.
The consequences in the 20th century would be appalling. Both world wars, Amrith argues, were global conflicts about power over the Earth, specifically its food and fuel, with hundreds of millions dying from famine and mass murder. In both war and peace, the relentless logic of exploiting the Earth knew no boundaries. “To slacken the pace”, Stalin argued while millions starved in the 1930s, “would mean to lag behind, and those who lag behind are beaten”. Amrith powerfully notes how Japanese and Nazi imperialism were often explicitly justified by reference to western examples in Africa and the Americas: Himmler hoped extermination would make Ukraine “a European California”.
From the charred ruins of war, Europe, the United States and Japan saw “the great acceleration”, as oil fuelled the next great leap forward. “Your home”, Shell adverts told Americans, “is a home that oil built”. Better diets, domestic appliances and cheap cars all made it seem that humanity had truly freed itself from its earthly chains. “Man can be the master of his environment and not its slave”, said the United Nations, and malaria, malnutrition and more were put into retreat. “We should open fire on nature”, Mao told China in 1958 – “When we ask the high mountain to bow its head, it has to do so! When we ask the river to yield the way, it must yield!”. “Haste was a narcotic,” Amrith writes, and no human or environmental cost was too high a price to pay for progress.
Better diets, domestic appliances and cheap cars all made it seem that humanity had truly freed itself from its earthly chains
Amrith turns to the environmentalist response to a trajectory of ecological crisis that Rachel Carson called “a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster”. Yet this shift in focus comes at the expense of the economic and geopolitical history of the last 50 years, leaving the sweeping narrative without its most recent chapters. Too little attention is paid to the oil crises, the rise of natural gas, the petropolitics of Russia and the Gulf, and China’s coal-fired booms. As he observes in conclusion, “more than half the cumulative total of carbon dioxide that human beings have emitted into the atmosphere since reliable records began has been emitted since 1990″. All the while, global temperatures keep rising, with ever more science confirming that our entire way of life has become “rampantly destructive… to the viability of life on Earth”.
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Amrith is not optimistic, and writes of the “distinctive, and tragic, feature of environmental politics – how quickly we went from the stirring of awareness to despair that we might be too late”. Of our “roads to recovery”, he is more convinced by “the thousand small actions” being pioneered in communities across the globe than “the allure of planetary silver bullets”. But will their cumulative impact be enough? “Probably not.”
The global system of “existential inequality” is “fortified” by “an arsenal of nature-dominating technology”. This “technosphere” of concrete megacities, vast plantations and mines, and webs of infrastructure is itself a huge contributor to carbon emissions, 40 per cent of which come from buildings. Our diets, especially those in the rich world and in increasingly meat-hungry China and Brazil, are also huge problems, even as hundreds of millions starve. Referencing the words of Indira Gandhi, Amrith notes that “efforts at environmental protection will simply fail if they proceed in isolation from social justice”, not least because many in the Global South see it as “others’ turn to eat”.
Changes in what and how we eat, Amrith writes, “have driven sweeping changes in how human beings have exploited the Earth, and exploited each other”. Yet he cautions that while there is an undeniable moral and environmental case to eat less industrially farmed meat, “one of the lessons of the 20th century’s modernist failures is that global problems are not always best approached with standardised global solutions”. Meat and dairy have deep-rooted cultural significance, and much of the world still has access to far too little protein. “Too narrow a focus on carbon emissions”, Amrith warns, risks a “reductionism” based on “a wilful ignorance of history”. The changes we need are much deeper than decarbonisation alone.
The past two centuries have alienated us from humanity’s defining relationship with the Earth, a process has left us unable to grasp or address the fact that our past and present have caused a crisis that threatens our future. “Once upon a time,” Amrith reminds us, “all history was environmental history. And it still is.” This stark book is a timely reminder that we forget that at our peril.
Christopher Kissane is a historian and the host of Ireland’s Edge
Further Reading
The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story (Bloomsbury, 2023) By Peter Frankopan
The popular historian’s latest sweeping saga focuses on humanity’s relationship with the environment.
Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future (WH Allen, 2023) By Ed Conway
Sky News’s economics correspondent explores the materials that have shaped our history, from copper to oil to lithium.
Not The End of the World (Chatto & Windus, 2024) By Hannah Ritchie
In a debate often burdened by doom, data scientist Ritchie offers optimistic examples of how we can successfully address climate change and environmental crisis.
