Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History

Magazine. From Mongol expansion to the world wars and from colonialism to the slave trade,

the biggest historical movements of the past 500 years

have not only reshaped human history, but also the natural world around us.

Sunil Amruth's new book, The Burning Earth, looks at some of history's biggest events from an

environmental perspective.

And I spoke to him to find out whether reconsidering history from this angle can offer any lessons for tackling the climate crisis today.

Your new book, The Burning Earth, is essentially a sweeping global environmental history

of the last 500 years. And it looks at how

humanity has reshaped and in many ways devastated the natural world in that time. In the book,

you look at some of the biggest themes in history, really, war, trade, industrialization, migration,

but you look at all of these things from an

environmental perspective. Can you tell us a bit about the story that emerged when you took

this new perspective on 500 years of historical events? I think you've put your finger on what's

been most interesting about the process of writing this book,

which is that a lot of the events or the transformations that I write about are widely familiar ones.

Perhaps the kinds of things that people would have studied at school, both World Wars, for example,

Industrial Revolution, History of Empires.

And for me, the guiding question as I was putting this book together was,

how do we foreground the environment?

And I think I wanted to try to do two things.

One is to bring in the environmental dimension of a lot of these

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