The Burning Earth review: How colonialism and industrialisation fuelled the climate crisis

The Burning Earth
Sunil Amrith (Allen Lane (UK); W. W. Norton (US))

So much has been written about the environmental crisis that it is difficult to say anything new. It is a hard problem, but Sunil Amrith takes a good swing at it.

He is a historian at Yale University, with interests that range from migration to climate history. In The Burning Earth: An environmental history of the last 500 years, Amrith documents the ways our societies have impacted the planet over the past half-millennium, from industrial…