The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan

 

The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan

The Earth Transformed is truly planetary in its scope and ambition. It's 658 numbered pages don't even include introductory material, plates, index, or the very comprehensive footnotes: to see those you will have to go to the publisher's website at bloomsbury.com and search there. It is unfortunate that there doesn't appear to be any mention of the whereabouts of the footnotes in the published edition. Just as well that they are online though because this is already one bulky tome and to include the thousands of footnotes would make it too awkward for use.

Frankopan takes us back temporally 4.5 billion years to the formation of the earth and forward into the future. We travel upwards and outwards from the earth’s core to ocean depths and land masses, then through the atmosphere to the farthest reaches of the solar system. Even more impressive is the scale of his learning. He has not only mastered the histories of most cultures in most parts of the world, he has also immersed himself in all the latest research on anthropology, biochemistry, climatology, dendrochronology, epidemiology, all the way through to zoology, and goodness knows how many other disciplines besides. 

However I am concerned about one or two errors of fact and interpretation that I have come across. Most of my knowledge, especially over such a vast purview, is general and fairly superficial. Often it's acquired through my pursuit of literature, rather than academic research into say ethnology. So when I come across statements that from this limited perspective I know to be inaccurate, it weakens my confidence in the project as a whole: what if there are similar mistakes present in other areas I know far less about? I'm very impressed by the breadth of Frankopan's learning, but I don't have the means to assess its depth. Here are two examples that have caused me concern:

• John Newton is castigated on page 363 for hypocritically writing hymn lyrics about being set free from his chains in Christ while having participated in the slave trade. There is a massive error of fact here and an even bigger failure of perspective. The words quoted are not by Newton, they are a 21st century insertion into his hymn Amazing Grace in a reworking of it as a contemporary worship song, one I have sung myself in Church. It's easy to look up Newton's words in the Olney Hymns, on which I wrote a dissertation while studying English Lit at Cambridge. If you do so you will not find the offending words but you will notice that the insertion is not even in the same metre as Newton's original. But that's piffling compared to the implied charge that Newton's sympathies were all with the slave traders. He certainly was sent to sea as a boy, press ganged into the Navy, became a slave himself at one point, and sailed on a number of slave ships. He led an unimaginably hard life in those days. However he rejected this wicked past and took a very prominent part in the abolition movement, writing pamphlets and preaching powerfully against slavery, and mentoring the young William Wilberforce. Is Frankopan unaware of these salient facts? Or is he going along with a contemporary campaign to discredit Newton, also manifest in Empireland, reviewed elsewhere in this blog?
• Also on the subject of British involvement with slavery, on page 366 Frankopan badly misrepresents Lord Mansfield's handling of the notorious Zong* massacre. Mansfield, who was Chief Justice at the time, is stated to have approved of the slaughter by throwing overboard of a number of slaves on the grounds that they were merely chattels, on a par with farm animals. This totally horrifying view is probably nonetheless a fair statement of British Law at the time. However the case actually came to Mansfield on appeal, after the lower court had found for the ship owners and against the insurers. Mansfield summarised the findings of the jury in the lower court as above, but clearly did not approve of their view, because he decided in favour of the insurers and against the wicked ship owners. That Mansfield was a prominent abolitionist I again discovered through literature: an anniversary programme on the BBC was trying to establish that Jane Austen was a firebrand social activist on the basis of a single remark in her novel Mansfield Park - and also on the much more substantial grounds that its titular setting emblazoned the name of a known abolitionist, Lord Mansfield. Suspicions aroused, I checked it all out on Wikipedia...

It is very much to be hoped that these errors will be corrected in any future edition, and especially that there aren't more lurking in areas where I don't have sufficient knowledge to discern them. Nevertheless the focus of The Earth Transformed is not on particular details but on the state of our interactions with our home planet, and its strength is in its mind-bogglingly comprehensive overview . If you have ever bemoaned the fissiparation of knowledge into ever tinier areas of specialism that become more and more remote from one another and from the awareness of ordinary people, fear not! Peter Frankopan is out there: he gets it and is doing something about it. He wants to see how raft after raft of new discoveries stack up together, and thus give a big picture – a Frankopanorama - of what we are doing to the planet and what it is doing to us.

Some of his key findings:

• The earth has always been in a state of flux. Conditions were originally unrecognisably different from anything we experience today and would have been lethal to contemporary life forms. Changes have come in the form of cataclysms: asteroid impacts, massive volcanic events, the collisions of continents, soaring and plummeting temperatures, orbital changes for both the earth and moon… There have been periods of relative stability too, when the various forces that circulate energy round the world have been in balance: but only until the next catastrophe. The idea that the state of the world is pretty much a given, roughly what it is now, is an illusion deriving from our ignorance of the deep past.

• Climate is an important driver of this flux. Frankopan is not in any way a climate change denier. The research he quotes shows a clear correlation between higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the past and raised temperatures, and between lower levels and reduced temperatures. The connection is indisputable. Climate change deniers have to accept that the world’s climate is changing, as the evidence is there: but they attribute this to “natural cycles,” in a naïve way that omits to examine the role that levels of CO2 play in those cycles. Does it matter how the CO2 gets there? It’s still going to warm the planet, however it comes, isn’t it? So why add more when there's already a problem? Stop junking our atmosphere, you oil barons!

• Climate directly impacts human history, including pestilences, famines, migrations, the economy, the winners and losers of political struggles and so on. So for example, a wetter climate across Central Asia allowed the hordes more fodder for their horses and enabled repeated incursions Westward into Europe: a period of stable warmth supported the crops that underpinned Roman prosperity and expansion: rainfall promoted the rise of South American civilisations and droughts led to their fall. However this requires more nuance than many recent historians have given us. Why for example did the Romans succeed in benefitting from the Roman Warm Period in ways that their many rivals, Etruscans, Persians, Carthaginians, Dacians, did not? Was it military might? Or better administration? Or those beautifully engineered aqueducts that enabled the expansion of Roman cities? Or why did a grassier steppe enable the Mongols to spread West, but did not lead to Europe spreading East? What were the cultural differences that set Eastern expansion against Western defensiveness? 

• These questions militate against pure climatic determinism, thus putting human agency back into the mix. Was one people better organised, or more adaptable, or technologically or culturally better resourced than another, to resist adverse conditions and benefit from favourable ones? Like other forms of fatalism, climatic determinism robs us of decision. As it defines human strategies and policies for making the most of the conditions we inhabit, this enquiry – how we deal with the conditions that confront us - is of first importance. 

• Volcanic eruptions are a constant bass underpinning this vast song of the Earth. Huge clouds of particles block out the Sun, suspend photosynthesis, reduce plant growth and plunge the world into famine, often for years at a time. Some concentrated bouts of eruptions seem to have permanently altered the entire biosphere: but even the lesser eruptions of historical times have brought massive effects. My take on this is that recurrent proposals to artificially introduce reflective particles into Earth’s atmosphere in order to combat global warming by shielding us from solar radiation is absolute lunacy. We will duplicate the effects of all those eruptions: less photosynthesis, reduced crops, smaller harvests, it all adds up to starvation for the world’s burgeoning human population. Worse, it will actually be counterproductive since photosynthesis is the leading means of reducing atmospheric C02. Please, anybody who reads these words, speak out against this dangerous stupidity!

So how to make use of this monumental opus? It is so wide-ranging yet so detailed that any attempt to absorb it in one go is certain to fail: I really tried! In fact I'm a second read through now, to try to pick up on all the matter that flooded past me first time, and that's why this review keeps being updated. Like this book, Frankopan’s earlier and very popular The Silk Roads took a very broad survey of its subject through time and space, but The Earth Transformed feels like it is telling multiple stories rather than just one. This may be why it tends to exhaust rather than inform. Much better to take it as a reference book. Dip into particular epochs or cultures or places in the massive index, read what amounts to an essay on the subject you are exploring, then investigate further using Bloomsbury's footnotes, while checking out names, places, movements, technologies etc on Wikipedia. All the best with that!

* Zong was the name of the slave ship concerned.