Flawed Attempt to Explain Everything
Following the best-selling footsteps of Yuval Harari, Peter Frankopan joins the genre of what might be labeled historical holisticism: books explaining everything, everywhere from the start of time to now. Trained in the history of Byzantium and author of a pair of books on the Silk Road, Frankopan has taken a stab at a climate-centered history of the world (a generation of scholars in environmental history might pause at the subtitle, “an untold history”).
Rather than a central thesis, The Earth Transformed offers overarching themes, such as the vulnerability that goes along with the benefits of global interconnectivity, or how optimal weather patterns are under-appreciated conditions of possibility for political developments. Frankopan works to weave together the stories of Asia (China in particular), Europe and the Americas (Africa gets shorter shrift), but many chapters end up repurposing established narratives — Europe’s industrious and industrial revolutions, or the Great Divergence between Europe and China — by interjecting climatic events. These tend to be volcanic eruptions, anywhere from Iceland to Indonesia, with speculation on the impact on political and economic events. Modern imperialism is told through the lens of commodities such as sugar and guano, and the Cold War is framed as agro-competition between the US, the USSR and China. The most intriguing bits look at changing attitudes to and knowledge of climate and weather; a more narrowly-focused history of ideas could have been more persuasive. Global environmental history is vital, but it’s hard to write the history of everywhere all at once.