Description
Anyone alive today belongs to the tiny fraction of species that have survived: more than 90% of the species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction?
Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept — and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable.
Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devastating consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion.
Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breathtaking storytelling to show that extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human one that illuminates our past and may alter our future.
From an award-winning historian of race, science and empire, this is a path-breaking and poignant history of extinction as a scientific idea, an imperial legacy and a political choice.
Endorsements
Shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize 2025
Guardian & Telegraph Best Science Book 2025
Waterstones Best Popular Science Book 2025
'A vital and important book' — David Olusoga