Book review: The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith (2024)

Book review: The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith (1)

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by Jeremy Williams

2 Comments on Book review: The Burning Earth, by SunilAmrith

“I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place,” says Sunil Amrith. His book The Burning Earth traces those threads over the last 500 years, showing the interweaving of progress and disaster.

It’s hard to argue with ‘human freedom’ as a worthy goal, but one of the most successful routes to that has been the way that fossil fuels have provided an escape from nature. “In the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature.”

The book begins with the Mongol empire and its dillemma: continue ruling as a nomadic force, or learn to govern settled lands? We spend time in the Mughal Empire, and follow the treasure ships of the Qing dynasty. I was particularly pleased to find a history of the spread of rice. I’ve read many accounts of the agrarian revolution and the neolithic shift to farming. None of them spent any time discussing rice, despite the fact that “rice sustained more human lives than any other crop until the advent of industrial agriculture.”

Following chapters look at the expansion of the Russian empire, battles to control land and taxation in China and India, and then the slave trade and colonialism. Plantation culture brought a new disposability to farming that hadn’t been there before. Plantation owners didn’t have any allegiance to the land. They came from the other side of the world, expecting to exhaust it and move on with the profits. Consumption without responsibility, a foreshadowing of what was to come.

There have been similar books attempting histories of this kind, but the global scope of the examples really sets The Burning Earth apart. It’s an engaging read, full of anecdotes and asides, eyewitness testimonies, unexpected connections. It’s very diverse, skipping between economic, social and environmental history across the continents.

Popular histories written in the UK perhaps inevitably have a Western perspective that casts Britain as the protagonist of history. Sunil Amrith is from Singapore, and so we hear as much from the East as we do from the West. We get a different view on well known historical events.

Plenty has been written about how railways reshaped the world, for example. Amrith covers this, but tells it from the point of view of the Chinese migrant workers who laid the rails across America. 90% of the Grand Pacific Railroad’s labourers were Chinese. The chapter on the Second World War describes the war-related famines experienced by civilian populations in Indonesia, Vietnam, China and India. In total seven million people died in these famines. Each country had a far higher death toll than Britain, but with the exception of the Bengal famine, I’ve not heard about them in any account of the war I’ve read.

By decentralising the usual Western story, Amrith illuminates a world of difference. As the book progresses we see how so much human progress depended on fossil fuels, ironing out the unpredictabilities and vulnerabilities of dependence on nature. We see the huge benefits of urbanism, industrial chemistry, growing political freedoms, global trade. In many places that story is still unfolding, and for those of us in consumer economies it is easy to point the finger at the carbon emissions of others and forget the weight of human suffering that is lifted by material progress.

Towards the end of the book we get to the fires, the floods, the emergence of new diseases, and of course the fight to restrain carbon emissions and rising temperatures. By setting this damage in the context of expanding progress, Amrith tells a nuanced story that invites us to look more closely at global inequalities. Yes, human progress has been inseparable from environmental harm, but we can look at this another way. Our solutions to that environmental harm are also part of a wider story, and “the pursuit of environmental justice extends and builds on those earlier and still unfinished struggles for human freedom.”

I really enjoyed The Burning Earth. I learned a lot. I appreciated the depth of its scholarship and the entertaining presentation thereof, and the gentle case it makes for pursuing environmental action and social action together.

2 comments

  1. a good review. Made me buy the book

    Reply

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Book review: The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith (2024)
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