Climate justice lets super-rich in developing world off the hook: Prize

In The Burning Earth , historian Sunil Amrith, winner of the 2025 British Academy Book Prize, reframes 500 years of human history as an environmental epic. It is a story of ambition, extraction, and the fragile balance between people and planet. Moving from colonial mines to modern pipelines, he shows how power and profit have reshaped the Earth itself.

Raised in Singapore and now teaching at Yale, Amrith belongs to a generation of scholars who sees history as a mirror for the climate crisis. In this interview, he reflects on empire, ecology, and the choices that brought us to the brink, and those that might still lead us back.

While climate change’s association with early industrialisation is often cited, the connections between global warming and environmental shifts over the last 50