A long story of Earth and man

"The Earth Transformed

By Peter Frankopan

Knopf, 695 pages, $40

What's the connection between sugar and Xi Jinping? Why does the political turbulence in today's Middle East trace back to the Cretaceous period? How did the humble potato revolutionize the world? Why did the great Mayan cities of the ninth century run out of potable water? What does the contemporary West African practice of polygyny -- one man, many wives -- have to do with the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Peter Frankopan raises these beguiling questions -- and many others, bless him -- in "The Earth Transformed," a book that examines the entire sweep of the relationship between humans and nature. He describes his book as "an untold history," by which he means that he's inserting a "crucial and much overlooked theme" in the long story of Earth and man -- that of climate. Aptly for such an ambitious corrective project, his work is monumental, so much so that the 200 pages of endnotes, a product of his research, are not printed as part of the book but are, instead, accessible from its publishers' website. While a shrewd remedy for unwieldiness, this does make reading awkward for the avid consumer who wants to know right away what additional light is shed by, say, Note 111 in Chapter 8, on Alexander the Great's fiscal policies.

Whereas Mr. Frankopan never disguises the fact that he is on the greenish side of the climate-change conversation, he steers clear of enviro-preaching and finger-wagging. Many readers will conclude, in truth, that he is rather agnostic about the doomsday scenarios painted by the climate activists who beset us. He makes clear that he is far more worried about the effect on the environment of nuclear escalation, outbreaks of disease and volcanic activity. In words that will startle many of us, he says that "by far the biggest risk to global climate comes from volcanoes." He contrasts the "considerable thought and attention" that have gone into planning for a warming world with the almost complete absence of planning or funding on the likely implications of major volcanic eruptions. Estimates put the chances of a mega-eruption -- one that could cost "hundreds of millions of lives" -- at one in six before the year 2100.

Mr. Frankopan, a popular and charismatic professor of global history at Oxford University, sticks faithfully to his metier in "The Earth Transformed." "As a historian," he says, "I know that the best way to address complex problems is to look back in time." Those who have read his previous books -- especially "The Silk Roads: A New History of the World" (2015) -- will know that he is that all-too-rare academic historian who doesn't see panache as the foe of scholarly rigor. "Most people can name," he writes, "the great leaders and major battles in the past, but few can name the biggest storms, the most significant floods, the worst winters, the most severe droughts." Environmental factors -- including the climate -- are not "actors in the story of our species." Rather they are "the very stage" on which our history has played out.

Historians are living in a golden age, Mr. Frankopan believes, thanks to a gusher of new evidence and types of materials that enhance our understanding of the past. And some of the most exhilarating advances have come in the way we understand the climate. He does warn against "environmental determinism," however, and urges historians and scientists to cultivate a "lightness of touch" when deploying their new tools and materials. We must not, in effect, let our present-day obsessions -- in particular climate catastrophism -- distort the way we study past interactions between the environment and humans.

Mr. Frankopan emphasizes how trivial the human time span is in the grand earthly scheme. The first "anatomically modern" humans appeared only around 500,000 years ago. Writing systems didn't come about until 5,000 years ago, and the texts and documents that allow us to piece together history "with nuance and detail cover around 0.000001 per cent of the world's past." This imposes on us the need not just to be humble but to spurn any pretense of omniscience. We also need, constantly, to question received wisdom.

As "celebrated" examples of the latter, Mr. Frankopan cites the unsuccessful attacks on Russia by Napoleon (in 1812) and Hitler (in 1941). Nature, in the form of a lethal Russian winter, is believed to have foiled the French and the Germans. But the "popular tropes," writes Mr. Frankopan, obscure the truth that overambitious objectives and terrible strategic decisions were what "doomed both invasions as much as, if not more than, the snow."

The history of the Earth is a history of large-scale transformations that have wreaked havoc in some cases and blessed us with benign climatic eras in others (such as the Roman Warm Period from 300 B.C. to A.D. 500). The most famous instance of the former was the asteroid strike in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago in which our beloved dinosaurs were wiped out. The rise of humankind, Mr. Frankopan writes, was the result of an "extraordinary series of flukes, coincidences, long shots and serendipities" that made the planet hospitable to our existence. It was "geological chance" that gave the Middle East its oil reserves, the result of warming in Cretaceous times.

Sugar and Xi Jinping? Here's how they link. Among the most salient examples of human re-engineering of the environment was the intensive cultivation of sugarcane by the British in the West Indies (using slave labor in a way that is still ghastly to relate). This led to a 400-fold increase in the consumption of tea in Britain, since the brew tasted better with sugar. Vast amounts of tea needed to be imported from China, which were procured in exchange for opium produced in British India. The opium trade became so important to the British exchequer that military force was used to keep the Chinese from stopping it -- leading to what China calls its Century of Humiliation, the memory of which is "a fundamental part of contemporary conceptualisations of world affairs" in Mr. Xi's Beijing.

Mr. Frankopan's thesis is that civilizations thrive best when they are resilient to shocks. Yet "hyperfragility," he believes, is the name of the game in the 21st century -- whether in response to warming, a rudderless U.S., Mr. Xi and Taiwan, or a nuclear Saudi Arabia and Iran. The march of history has left such places as Uruk, Nineveh, Harappa, Angkor and Tikal in ruins, not because of climate change but because of a lack of resilience to shocks, made worse by obtuse planning and even worse decision-making. That's the lesson Mr. Frankopan is trying to teach us.

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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism & Society." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Doom May Have to Be Delayed
Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 22 Apr 2023: C.9.