Peter Frankopan’s huge study shows that climate change has shaped all human history — never mind what comes next
At the beginning of the 22nd century the civilised world teetered on the brink of catastrophe. For generations people living in the world’s most developed regions had enjoyed the fruits of steady economic progress. Trade boomed. Cities expanded. The imperious rulers of centralising states wielded formidable military and cultural influence over their neighbours. Some even fancied they had conquered nature itself.
Yet, as the new century dawned, it became clear that nature was the one thing humans could not tame. The Earth’s climate was changing. Where the effects were felt they were terrible. Crops failed. Fish stocks disappeared. Inflation rocketed. People fled their homes or starved. Wars erupted. These crises humbled superpowers, and convinced some observers that they were witnessing a cosmic reckoning. Future scholars would identify the beginning of a “Dark Age” at the turn of the 22nd century BC.
BC? Yes indeed. For this description of human society plunged into chaos by climate change is not a dystopian imagining of the world seventy-odd years from now. Rather, it is one interpretation of events four millennia ago, when varying weather patterns over the Atlantic combined with shifts in the intensity of solar radiation to set off a megadrought, which affected North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, east Asia and parts of Africa. The most famous casualty was the Akkadian Empire, ruled from modern Iraq. The empire’s founder, Sargon, had been lionised as “king of the world”. His successor on whose watch everything dried up and crumbled, was vilified as a man cursed by the gods.
● Read our review of The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan
The case of the Akkadian Empire and the megadrought of 2200BC is but one of hundreds explored in Peter Frankopan’s extraordinary and panoptic study of climate change since the formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Frankopan, who began his career as a historian of the medieval crusades, is now professor of global history at Oxford University. The Earth Transformed is his second history of the world, following his 2015 bestseller The Silk Roads. Like The Silk Roads, the twin themes of this book are connectivity and complexity. In short, Frankopan shows you how everything fits together — with the caveat that it’s pretty complicated.
He begins at the beginning. The fact that life exists on Earth at all is an astronomical doozy, owing to our planet’s orbital position in a “goldilocks zone” — neither too hot nor too cold. And the present conditions that are so agreeable to human life — lots of oxygen, little ice, an atmosphere that stops the sun burning us to death etc — are all the products of climate change, triggered by volcanoes, asteroids and solar radiation cycles.
Climate change has been a global historical constant. It has made the world the way it is. Why is Qatar rich enough to try to buy Manchester United? Because during the Cretaceous period, about 139 to 65 million years ago, the world was warm and the high oceans were home to billions of marine micro-organisms, which died and eventually formed the oil and gas deposits that lie under the Gulf states. What made Brexit Britain possible? After the last Ice Age, rising sea levels, combined with a tsunami in about 6150BC, sank Doggerland, which once joined us to the continent.
Squint hard enough and almost any historical event can be said to have had a climatic component. During antiquity many civilisations linked weather conditions with the caprice of the gods: it is probably no coincidence that a great flood that wipes out humans, saving only the pious few, appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow and the Old Testament book of Genesis.
The turmoil that saw the Roman Republic collapse began with Julius Caesar’s murder in 44BC. But it may have owed more to a huge volcanic eruption in Alaska the next year, which caused temperatures around the world to plunge by 7C. Later the western Roman Empire collapsed after waves of Barbarian migration into Europe — these may well have been initially set off by a megadrought in northwest China in the 4th century AD.
Or take the Middle Ages. The rise of Genghis Khan in the 12th century AD can be linked to a moment of unusual fertility and abundance on the Mongolian steppe. By contrast, the Black Death pandemic, which killed half of Europe’s population from 1347, attacked societies already made vulnerable by extremely unsettled weather patterns earlier in the century, which caused repeated harvest failures, animal diseases and mass starvation.
These are just a few of the case studies Frankopan unpacks in his vast, learned and timely work of what the French would call histoire-géo. (The endnotes and bibliography alone exceed 200 pages.) Never does he settle for an easy gloss. In fact, far more of Frankopan’s book is devoted to arguing that climate change is not a sufficient explanation for the course of great events than to pointing out where it unquestionably has been the prime mover in human history.
That thematic insistence on complexity, along with abundant scientific terminology, does not always make this book a light read. So be it. The last medievalist to attempt a unified history of humanity was Yuval Noah Harari, whose worldwide bestseller Sapiens was easier reading but ultimately glib. The Earth Transformed is Sapiens for grown-ups.
And, of course, it holds lessons for a world grappling with rapid climate change caused by human industry. In Frankopan’s chapter on the Middle Ages he quotes a medieval Chinese poet, Li Qingzhao. The verse could serve as a warning for today:
“You should’ve been more cautious,/ Better educated by the past./ The ancient bamboo books of history/ Were there for you to study./ But you didn’t see.”
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan
Bloomsbury pp736
