Sonil Amrit, a Professor of History at Yale University who also holds a professorship at the Yale School of the Environment, shares his thoughts on his book, 'The Burning Earth.' He serves as the Director of the McMillan Center for International and Regional Studies and as the Deputy Provost for International Affairs at Yale.
Amrit has received numerous awards, including the Infosys Prize in the Humanities in 2016, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and the Tony Blair World History Prize in 2025. He has authored five books focusing on Asia within the context of world history.
During the discussion, he elaborates on his work, 'The Burning Earth.' He explains that writing the book resulted from the convergence of his academic and personal life, as he had been researching the themes underpinning this work for about twenty years.
He was particularly interested in the interconnection between migration, human displacement, and environmental changes. More than a decade ago, he published 'Crossing the Bay of Bengal,' which marked his first foray into environmental history. In it, he examined mass population movements, especially from Tamil Nadu to Southeast Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries, many of whom went to work on rubber plantations or in port cities such as Singapore, Penang, and Rangoon, noting that this represented a moment of fundamental environmental transformation.
Concurrently, as a teacher, parent, and citizen, he recognized the inevitability of the climate crisis, prompting him to broaden his research focus beyond his narrow specializations to the larger question: how did humanity reach its current state of planetary crisis, which is the essence of 'The Burning Earth.'
Amrit notes that his approach differs by avoiding inherited narratives of Eurocentric history. He emphasizes that his own education is not rooted in European or North American history. In his view, much of so-called global history traditionally takes the familiar history of the North Atlantic as its starting point.
To circumvent this, he decided to begin the book in China and conclude it in Indonesia, aiming to anchor the work in Asia. He believes that Asia has always been home to the majority of humanity and remains so today, making it appropriate for him to examine planetary history based on the region that has been most densely populated for the longest time.
He acknowledges that ensuring maximum accuracy in such a book is the most challenging task, as it is impossible to possess primary expertise in all covered areas. Academia, in his opinion, is a collective endeavor. Although the book relies on his own research in some areas, in others, it synthesizes his reading across multiple disciplines.
As a historian, Amrit actively incorporates new scientific developments from the physical sciences. He mentions fascinating work in paleoclimatology, which attempts to reconstruct past climatic conditions using ice cores, lake sediments, and tree rings. He observes that these disciplines have traditionally interacted weakly, but recent climate and environmental studies are fostering a convergence of vastly different conceptions of what constitutes an archive.
When he uses the term 'elite' when discussing social stratification linked to economic growth presented as community well-being, he points out that this growth is usually perceived as exploitative. He clarifies that 'The Burning Earth' is not an activist book, and therefore, it defines villains less sharply than activist literature. Nevertheless, his reasoning is strongly informed by the severity of ecological inequality and how planetary destruction over the last two centuries was disproportionately, though not exclusively, driven by the elites' pursuit of luxury and accumulation.
The book narrates both the story of human need and the story of human greed. Amrit argues that we must consider desire, states, liberation, and truly liberating promises that contributed to part of this environmental destruction, and which cannot be reduced solely to questions of avarice or capitalism. However, his central question is: what alternatives existed? Who thought differently?
He also points to the horrific, almost genocidal incidents featured in the book. In his view, this is one of the key narratives demonstrating that moments of the most intense and accelerated environmental destruction in recent centuries almost always coincided with periods of intense violence. Violence underlies 'The Burning Earth'—not only violence against the earth or nature, but also against other people. Modern world wars are part of a very long pattern where armed violence, militarism, and military destruction are inextricably linked to large-scale environmental devastation.
