Peter Frankopan | The Earth Transformed

Best-selling author of The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, introduces his revelatory account of how the natural world has shaped human history and sheds fascinating new light on today’s climate crisis and the epochal shifts of the past. 

In The Earth Transformed we are reconnected with our ancestors who, like us, worshipped, exploited and conserved the natural environment – and draws salutary conclusions about what the future may bring. Peter shows that engagement with the natural world is not new: exploring 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. Taking us from the beginning of recorded history to the present day, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with our continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world. 

In conversation with David Reynolds