We’re thrilled to be partnering with the recently reopened* Manchester Museum to welcome best-selling author Peter Frankopan to Manchester for the launch of his new book THE EARTH TRANSFORMED – a major history of how a changing climate has dramatically shaped the development-and demise-of civilisations across time. Peter will be in conversation with Caroline Dodds Pennock (On Savage Shores).

About the book:

Most people can name the influential leaders and major battles of the past. Few can name the most destructive storms, the worst winters, the most devastating droughts.

In The Earth Transformed, ground-breaking historian Peter Frankopan shows that engagement with the natural world and with climatic change and their effects on us are not new: exploring, for instance, the development of religion and language and their relationships with the environment; tracing how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples; scrutinising how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus formed the origins of the bureaucratic state; and seeing how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history. Understanding how past shifts in natural patterns have shaped history, and how our own species has shaped terrestrial, marine and atmospheric conditions is not just important but essential at a time of growing awareness of the severity of the climate crisis.

Taking us from the Big Bang to the present day, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with humankind’s continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world.

About the author:

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published by Bloomsbury in 2015, was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and remained in the top 10 for nine months after publication. It was named one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ 2010-2020 by the Sunday Times. The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019.

Caroline Dodds Pennock is a Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield and the UK’s only Aztec historian. Her first book, Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture (Palgrave Macmillan) won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for 2008. Her latest book is On Savage Shores – a landmark work that shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery by exploring how the great civilisations of the Americas – the Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others – discovered Europe.

This event will be held in the Kanaris Theatre at Manchester Museum. The Museum and exhibits will be open before the event, which starts at 19.00, and a short while after (closing at 21.00)

Tickets are £5.00 or free when preordering a copy of the book. THE EARTH TRANSFORMED will also be available to purchase on the night and Peter will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.

*Manchester Museum reopens on Saturday 18th February and more information can be found here: https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/

Information about access and getting to the museum can also be found here: https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/visit-us/access/#:~:text=Access%20in%20the%20museum,map%20of%20the%20museum%20here.