The relation between natural history and human history is an interesting one, particularly if a bit of information history can be worked in. Two books published in 2023 take very different and contrasting approaches to this topic.
Peter Frankopan’s The earth transformed: an untold history is one of those works for which the phrase “big picture” could have been invented. Frankopan takes as his thesis that the natural environment is a crucial, if not the determining, factor in global history, affecting humankind as much as the other inhabitants of the Earth. Volcanic eruptions, solar activities, atmospheric, oceanic and other shifts, as well as the activities of humans, are fundamental parts of the past and the present. His sweeping analysis takes us from the formation of the earth to current concerns about climate change, the Brexit referendum, and the US Republican party’s policies on coal usage in the 2020s. Academic, lengthy (695 pages), and detailed, with extensive footnoting and referencing from primary sources, this is magisterial work rather than an easy read, but will certainly be a major sourcebook for the topic. Although not focused on information history, some intriguing snippets are worked in, showing how the communication of information and knowledge enabled humanity to reshape the environment, from the transmission across time of an understanding of the best placement of fireplaces in caves in prehistory, and the proliferation and copying of texts in the so-called Axial Age of the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE, to the standardisation and documentation of shipping routes in the sixteenth century, and the publication of concerns about pollution in mid-twentieth century women’s magazines.
Where Frankopan’s book is all-encompassing, John Brewer’s Volcanic: Vesuvius in the age of revolutions paints its picture on a much smaller canvas, and differs in its tone and purpose, being more of an analysis in the micro-scale. Its focus is on geology, and specifically on the Bay of Naples region, with its volcano, Vesuvius, in the first half of the nineteenth century, building on a detailed analysis of the entries in the visitors’ book of a guesthouse for tourists and scholars visiting Vesuvius. Brewer expands on this cover all aspects of the impact of Vesuvius, from the cultural, as an emblem of the sublime, through to scientific, as studies of Vesuvius added to growing knowledge base of geology, and earth science generally, and the political, with the volcano seen as a metaphor for the revolutionary politics of the time. Informational aspects suffuse the book, from the growth of travel literature and guidebooks, to the activities of those who collected and documented minerals from the volcano. There is also coverage of the emerging scholarly networks and publications of the early scientists (though that term was not yet coined) for whom Vesuvius was an significant object of study, including Davy (whose series of geological lectures at the Royal Institution foregrounded Vesuvius), Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, Lyell, and Babbage.
Two very different books then, which show how information history can crop up in accounts of different scope of the interplay between the environment and human history. Books of this sort, which weave information history into stories told from different perspectives are a valuable complement to works of information history per se.
The Occasional Informationist 