Bloomsbury bags Frankopan's 'masterpiece' on how natural world shaped history

Bloomsbury has snapped up The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan, an "essential and incontrovertible" account of how shifts in the natural world have shaped history.

Alexis Kirschbaum, head of Bloomsbury Trade, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan. It will be published on 2nd March 2023, in hardback, e-book and audio.

"Most people can name the influential leaders and major battles of the past," the synopsis reads. "Few can name the most destructive storms, the worst winters, the most devastating droughts.

"In The Earth Transformed, ground-breaking historian Peter Frankopan shows that engagement with the natural world and with climatic changes and their effects on us are not new: exploring, for instance, the development of religion and language and their relationships with the environment, tracing how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples, scrutinising how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus formed the origins of the bureaucratic state, and seeing how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history. 

"Understanding how past shifts in natural patterns have shaped history, and how our own species has shaped terrestrial, marine and atmospheric conditions is not just important but essential at a time of growing awareness of the severity of the climate crisis. Taking us from the beginning of recorded history to the present day, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with humankind’s continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world."

Kirschbaum said: "Peter Frankopan is the most extraordinary writer and thinker. Twelve years in the making, and drawing upon a vast collection of material written in dozens of languages, along with an astonishing archive of climate and genomic data, The Earth Transformed reimagines our history as one that is shaped by the natural world and our interaction with it. 

"There isn’t a more urgent story to be told about our past and our prognosis, and Peter Frankopan is the only writer who could tell it. The Earth Transformed is essential and incontrovertible, and it is a masterpiece."

Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University and senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published by Bloomsbury in 2015, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and remained in the top 10 for nine months after publication. It was named one of the books of the decade by the Sunday Times. The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and won the Human Sciences Prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019.

"This book has been thrilling and terrifying to write," Frankopan said. "Like most people, I have followed closely scientific projections about the future of the world that we and the generations that follow us will live in. As a historian, I wanted to understand the history of the earth’s climate since the start of geological time up to the present day not just using archaeology, texts and material culture, but an array of new material from ice-cores, fossilised pollen, strontium isotope analysis and a lot more. 

"All this new evidence has helped me to paint a kaleidoscopic picture of the ways that our species has engaged with the climate, but also how it has done so with nature, with resources, with animals, plants and with each other. I hope readers will learn a lot – but also enjoy it."