The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
Five hundred years in which the pursuit of freedom from nature reshaped the planet — and undermined it.
Acheter : Amazon · Place des libraires · Fnac
Le mot de POP LIVRE
Amrith's question is unusual: not simply how humans damaged the planet, but how the ambition to become independent of nature — through empire, machines, plantations and cities — produced both freedom and destruction from the same act. He writes across five hundred years and every continent, and the reviewers who matter here are other historians, who agree he pulled it off. Long, and worth it. Read it if you want the environmental crisis placed in real historical time.
Présentation
Sunil Amrith, professor of history at Yale, writes the environmental history of the last five centuries as a single global story: how empires, migrations, plantations, engines and wars remade the earth, and how the drive to free human societies from natural constraint ended up threatening the conditions for life on it. The book moves across continents rather than staying in one, and connects colonial history to ecological transformation instead of treating them separately. Historian J. R. McNeill called it the most readable global environmental history yet written; Jill Lepore and Sven Beckert both singled out the writing. Reviewers agree on the essential point: this is scholarship written to be read for pleasure.