Climate is one of many factors that play a part in people’s large-scale movements: Amitav Ghosh

“The pieces in this collection are about a wide variety of subjects, yet there is one thread that runs through most of them: of bearing witness to a rupture of time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago, in the eighteenth century,” he writes in the book’s introduction, adding that this was the period that saw the birth of modernity and industrial civilisation, in which, under the leadership of the British empire, the West tightened its grip over most of the world, culminating ultimately in the emergence of the U.S. as the planet’s sole superpower.