How did a bumper crop of grass power the Mongol Empire? Today I'm joined by of the

grass power the Mongol Empire. Today I'm joined by Sunil Amrith, author of the

burning earth to talk about what a focus on the natural environment can reveal

about human history. We talk about what

really won the first world war, what Marco Polo thought about Java, and why the

Americans were wrong about rice eaters?

I hope you enjoy the interview.

Sunil Amrith, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having, Ash.

So I suppose the first question is, why did you want to write a history of the world

from an environmental perspective?

What was the seed of that idea?

The seed was really wanting to reckon with how we have arrived at this point of planetary crisis and from a conviction that we really do need to take a long view about the many tangled paths that have brought us here.

And so did you come at it with a particular interest in one historical period and branched outwards or was it that you had

this method that was developed somewhere else then you were applying it on to history?

It's a really interesting question. I am a historian by training and everything else that I've written is very much history.

My specialty is very much in studying the modern world, it's 19th and 20th century.

So for me, the adventure and the stretch here was actually to take that much

longer-term perspective that I do in the burning earth. Well yeah so you're

going back to you know the Mongol hordes and you're like, okay, all right, they don't have, you know,

you don't have newspapers, you don't have newsreels that you can go back to.

I mean, what were the most enjoyable sources for you to get your teeth into? There were those that I was

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