This book is a venture into history on a grand scale, a contribution to what is coming to be known variously as “big history,” “deep history,” and “evolutionary history.” I begin with a foundational question: How has the history of the earth system shaped the history of the human condition? The most cursory consideration of these histories suggests the basic outline of the story. Over the very long term, the history of a volatile and changing earth has driven biological and human evolution: it has been a rough journey, and we are products of that journey. During long epochs of organic hunter-gatherer systems and agrarian economies, humanity was fundamentally subject to natural forces of an evolving earth system; our sudden transition into fossil-fueled industrial modernity has made us an increasingly active and determining agent in that earth system. Occasionally, too, hurricanes, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions remind us that the earth is a very volatile platform for our finely balanced societies and economies.

This book, then, explores the role of nature – more precisely natural history – in human history. Doing so challenges a fundamental if rarely spoken tenet of my profession. We historians are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that natural forces in some way circumscribe human agency. Fearful of being labeled “environmental determinists,” we opt for a model of change in which all of the significant causal agents in historical processes are internal – or endogenous – to human culture, society, and economy. Given that most historians work on the past three to four centuries at most, this is not a completely unreasonable posture, because natural systems typically operate over much longer time frames.