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Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)
00:53:45
An interview with Peter Frankopan
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- [00:00]
Peter Frankopan
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Poe
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Javier Mejia
Hi, everyone. Welcome to your podcast. I'm your host, Javier Mejia from Stanford University. And today I have the great pleasure to be with Peter Franco Penn. Peter is professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he's also the director of the Oxford center for Byzantine Research. He's the author of, well, many very popular books. We're going to talk about his career in a second, but he wrote this book called the Earth An Untold History. It was recently published and we're going to be talking about this book and again about his career. I'm very glad of having Peter here. Peter, how are you?
- [01:48]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, very good. A little bit, little bit chilly in Northern Europe, where I am sitting right now, we're below average everything, temperatures, rainfall, but not too far away. About, about 500 kilometers away in Spain right now, we're going to be touching 40 degrees centigrade, which for April is really, really warm. You're getting morning temperatures in North Africa starting at dawn at about 30 degrees. So something's, something's going on. So it's a good moment to be thinking about changing climates, weather patterns and things like this.
- [02:18]
Javier Mejia
I totally agree. That's one of the things that made reading your book a fascinating experience because it's so tangible in a certain way. Although you take us millions of years back in history to think about it. So. And we're going to explore that in a second. But before that, I would like to ask you a bit about your career and how you became the scholar that you are now. You're a special type of scholar, right? You're a historian, but one with extraordinary influence and rich in the public opinion. What's the story? How do you end up being the scholar that you are today?
- [02:56]
Peter Frankopan
It's a great question, and I probably should go and see a shrink would have a better way of explaining it than myself. I mean, I think it's a series of. Of chance and good timing, and those have all gone hand in hand, I think, through anybody's career. I think that the modesty of thinking that, you know, you're being in the right place at the right time helps. I mean, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and my historical context was the Cold War. My anxieties about the future were about the Cold War. And in fact, one of the important elements of that was around ecological devastation and degradation. But the reason I went into work on the regions that I specialized in, which have been in principally the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, Iran, China, and then, you know, also India, Pakistan, these kinds of parts of the world, too. I started working on those when I was a teenage boy. In fact, it seemed to me obvious that the things we learned about in our history classes didn't tell me anything about those anxieties and worries and changes going on in the world. And then my undergrad I did at Cambridge and was very lucky that I picked interesting topics. I mean, one of them in my last year, we have to do in Cambridge something called a special subject, which has two examination papers on it. So it's a really important part of the. Of your final mark. And everybody around me had said, oh, there's this fantastic paper on the lesser gentry kind of minor aristocrats in Norfolk in the late Middle Ages. And I went to the first lecture and I thought, that's got to ring someone's bell, but it doesn't ring mine. And everybody else came out of that same seminar. I mean, literally everybody's saying that's the single best seminar I've ever been to. And I thought, you know, I'm either not that clever, which is entirely likely and probable, or, you know, everybody needs to find their own space and their own kind of thing. And not only am I going to struggle because I didn't think it was interesting, but also these people can see something I can't And I never like to be the guy at the back of the classroom who's going to flunk his exams. So I picked out a paper on Roman imperial power with Mary Beard, who's become a very, very famous classical historian or historian of the classical world, particularly of ancient Rome. And our first seminar I went into, she held up the transcript of the intercepted phone calls of Prince Charles is about to be crowned King Charles, who'd been having an affair with his mistress, who's now going to become Queen Camilla. And the newspapers had managed to intercept this phone call and she printed it out and gave it to everybody sitting around the closet, like 20 of us. And I thought I struggled to understand what this has to do with Roman imperial power. And I kept checking my notes to see whether I was in the right room, the right place, you know, had I some something and have I drunk something funny. And she said, I'm going to show you a picture of Prince Charles as he was in his, like, becoming the Prince of Wales in his fancy outfit. And now you're going to read this transcript of him talking about having sex and which body parts he wanted to feel and be and so on. How did that make you feel? And then she showed us a picture of the Emperor Augustus and she said, here's the Emperor Augustus at the Prima porta, looking ripped looking, he's done a good full workout in the gym. And then she read out, it's the text from Suetonius that says Augustus was a small little man, terrible hair, bad breath, bad teeth. And she goes, who's the real Augustus? Who's the real Prince Charles? And it was like being in a power station and someone flips on all the fuses that had gone off. And that moment made me understand what history is all about. And because of that, I was working already on the Byzantine world, on the origins of Islam, on who are the Russians, who are the Ukrainians, who what is Old Church Slavonic? How do the peoples of the step world of Central Asia fit into the big pictures of history? And then I just got very lucky. I did better in my exams than I thought. I did a PhD on a topic that I went to go and see what was she wonderful scholar who was based at Harvard, Angeliki Lau. And she took me out for a cup of coffee and she went, you're crazy to do that for a PhD dissertation, because there's nothing original you can say. And I had a few dark moments. All scholars on the way up forget about the dark moments and the bits where you think you can't do it. And then I spent 15 years being an anonymous academic that I guess people thought did interesting things, but didn't get invited to particularly big conferences. You know, the niche that I work in is absolutely irrelevant to Western Europe. No one wants a historian of the steppes, of the, of the Mongol worlds. No, no one's interested in history of Iran and Persia. And it just so happened that then about 15 years ago, people, particularly in the U.S. woke up and figured that the world is changing and we need to understand what was going on with the Quran and with Islam. We need to understand sectarianism and the difference between Sunnis and Shia. We need to understand the post Soviet space and how people used history. And here we are, hey, presto, Putin and his long essay about Russia and Ukraine and then China, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan. All these places that I work on, they're on the move. And it was a lot of chance. I mean, so it could have been that I'd been on your podcast, have you, talking about Norfolk Gentries and how that relates to the elites of Palo Alto or how to map Stanford and, and, and that version of me would, I'd like to think, would have been equally interesting and I would have said things that are equally provocative, maybe more so, because maybe I had to work harder to think of interesting things to say. But I, I, you know, as, because I, I wrote a book about the Silk Roads that generated some interest and platforms and opportunities and, you know, I've been very, very lucky that the cookie crumbled in my direction so far. Even this new book I written, Earth Transformed, if it had been published a year and a half ago, people would have been much more skeptical about climate change. But with the winter you had in California, when you had, you know, in the spring, where you had snowfall in LA, where you have 40 degree temperatures in Madrid at the moment, where you have more than 10 million people maybe displaced in Pakistan last year by floods, the highest ever recorded temperature in China and Australia. Everybody realizes there's something going on, and the question is to work out what comes next. My job as a historian is not to forecast the future, but simply to explain how we got to where we are.
- [09:16]
Javier Mejia
Let me ask you a bit more about your. I mean, there are many, many questions I want to ask you, like, based on just what you said, but I'm curious before getting to the core of your book, about your interaction with the rest of the academic community. Right. You already have described how there has been some tensions there, but I was thinking specifically on the fact that you begin. You begin the book by making reference to a piece of mythological evidence. Right. You talk about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the paradise and. Right. And how that says something about environmental pressures and so on. And then you complement that with a large set of scientific evidence. And my thought while reading those pieces was, well, this is an interesting construction of many different sources of evidence. And then what I was thinking is, how do you sell this to the niches or the different tribes that compose academia nowadays? Right. So I feel that humanities has been moving away from quantifying evidence. I don't know if you agree with this view or if the UK is probably somewhat different, but I would struggle to imagine them paying so much attention as you do to the scientific evidence. Right. And on the other hand, there's a bunch of people that would be concerned about this other type of evidence as well. Maybe there's something valuable in oral traditions that is informative of all the past. So that's a very broad issue that was in the back of my head, I guess. I want to ask you, how do you feel that your research fits in those. In that conversation or those different conversations? Do you feel some tension there? I would ask you. I would like to ask you also about the potential of those different sources. Do you think that we're moving in a direction where we can exploit them more systematically as we have much more of those every day? I would like to hear your thoughts on that.
- [11:33]
Peter Frankopan
Well, it's a great question. So you have to make hand signals, Javier. When you want me to. When you want me to shut up. So the answer doesn't go on too long. You know, there's a lot in there to answer. I mean, I guess on the first line, you know, when you publish something, and particularly if it has a relatively high degree of visibility, you lose control of it immediately because you know, you can't. How you define yourself, how you think about historiographies, methodologies, it becomes irrelevant because you become sort of the animal that gets hunted down by everybody else who wants to define things and often get it wrong and think that you're trying to say something very different. I think with. With. I mean, I suppose I do. There are three areas that I think are particularly important for what I try and done in this new book, and I guess to some extent in Silk Road books, too. First is that history is all about exclusivity. It's about excluding people. We're sort of better about that. You go to any campus and any history faculty and they'll talk about inclusivity and globalisms. And then, and then people will get very angry very quickly to argue about what does global mean? And is there such a thing as global history? And is that just meaning everybody? And in what level? And how do you do that? And who should be doing it, who has the rights? And I, I respect all those arguments. I mean, that's part of my daily life as a. As a tenured academic. But those are of much less interest to general readers. And, you know, they have a particular place where they need to be chewed over. But at some point you've got to decide which side of the fence you sit on rather than dance on top of it energetically for a long time. So, you know, so in this book, I spend quite a lot of time making sure that places like Sub Saharan Africa, the pre Columbian Americas, Oceania, Southeast Asia, my beloved steppes and nomadic peoples who, you know, broadly speaking, in the last 2,000 years, the Western canon have been completely excluded or misrepresented. You know, and I don't know which one's worse, but both are critical. The fact that faculties in the last 10 or 15 years think they're doing a much better job at it, you know, there's so many metrics that show that's not the case. In terms of support for Global south, even the label Global South, I find extremely difficult, problematic, in some ways offensive, the idea that all these peoples somehow have the same shared past, present and future, and future. So I think, I think some of it is around how to write history that brings in different regions. And we could talk about what global means. And to some scholars, it means nothing. To some, it's just ideas that can be applied across and looked at and investigated in different ways. But when. But there are a few things, not that many, that are truly universal. And global climate is one disease, often is another one that's transcontinental and has sort of similar impacts because disease does the same thing whether you're rich or poor or has the same breakdowns no matter where you are. So there are a few of those themes. But I think the global things that I'm trying to do are really important. And, you know, Silk Road's got a lot of attention for moving away from Eurocentrism. But in my country Here in the UK, 93% of history faculty work on the history of the west, and that includes people who think that they're working on different parts of the world, but actually they're working on Europeans arriving in India rather than what what, you know, a better distribution. So I think that that is an important part of any histor, his historiographical debate. And quite often historians act as gatekeepers by privileging knowledge and privile, privileging who has the right to write about things. But you've got to start somewhere. And in my view, looking at how colonization, Hawaii or Polynesian islands and Iceland has parallels, and looking at the scholars, the very few who've looked at those kinds of questions, it's really important to be showcasing some of that research. So that's one. The globalism second periodization. We worry about a lot, not just what the labels we use and what we call them. No one spends too much time worrying about that, although it is an issue what is the Middle Ages and who for. But one of the challenges about, about academic history is that you have specialized to do a PhD and, you know, you then get appointed into a. Into a field and it's quite hard to break down those chronological barriers. So you might argue where those might start and stop. But it's not often that you find people who work on the 20th century writing about, you know, the 14th or 15th centuries. When people do refer backwards, you know, like Graham Allison's wonderful book the Thucydides Trap, it tends to be the same palette of Western Civ that comes up again and again. You know, the ancient Greeks fighting the Romans and their empire, the Crusades.
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Javier Mejia
Right.
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Peter Frankopan
It's all stuff we know about, but it's never about the Abbasids or the Buyids and what the difference is between the two. It's never about different types of organizations in the Maya world. So the opening up different periods and widening that lens, it's really hard to do because it requires a lot of reading, it requires adding to skills, new languages, it requires reading into scholarship. But, you know, there's no, there's no harm in doing that as you become more senior as a scholar. In fact, some of us, like me, would think there's a responsibility to be widening your horizons rather than just drilling downwards. But, you know, everybody has to do it their own way and. And each of us need to find our own rhythm at our own field that we want to plow. And we need to be maybe a bit more tolerant of allowing each other the space to do it in the way we want, rather than jumping at each other, which we are quite. In the humanities, we are much more jumpy than in the sciences. And that's something that's really surprised me in the last 10 years. I sit On a couple of boards of prizes for scientific prizes, where there's quite often people want humanities scholars on the boards. And what's amazing when you talk to scientists about their colleagues, rivals, competitors, whatever, the. The unanimity of support when people say, you know, what's have you working on? What? How'd you rate it? All scientists say he's a genius and will explain why and then you'll say, you know, is he right? And I know I don't agree with him about anything, but I think maybe collaboration works in a different way to the old style monasticism of monks and occasional clusters of monks who want to protect their territory rather than working out how to support each other. So at the most base level, that means that all of us writing about history, it's in our interest that books cross into the general public readership. It's our interest that we try to galvanize above all the next generation of undergrads, but even high school students trying to get them to think it's interesting and exciting, so they don't just all go and study business and engineering and so on. Great subjects, by the way, nothing wrong with that. But, you know, we're also trying to sell our subject and. But the periodisation of trying to say we need to try to be more ambitious is the second, the third one is, as you mentioned, is about the sciences. So we as historians have been slightly blindsided, or many, many have been blindsided by the, the surge in what plant sciences, biological sciences, disease histories can tell us about the past. And some of those are to do with climate, like I write about in my book, but not all of them. So being able to deconstruct the phylogenetic tree of the plague of Yersinia pestis bacterium completely transforms how we understand things like the Black Death. So, you know my colleague Monica Green, who's brilliant, you know, it's been shouting about this in the darkness for years around how important it is that historians understand not even complex maths, but understand statistics, understand sciences and, you know, it's not hard to learn about this stuff. It's not hard to learn Khmer or Japanese or Bantu, you just need to spend time doing it. But if you are an, if you're a salaried academic, you know, you have the privilege of being able to, outside your turntable to decide what your range should be. And I think it's partly because how funding has worked that there's a lot of pressure on us all to be producing books all the time. It makes it much harder to say, look I'm going to spend 10 years working on a project and it's going to be a big one. Rather than being rewarded for being sort of consistent performer at books that, you know, you, you, you know, you don't get rewarded for having the time to, to go big. But we can't all do the same things. Everyone has to make their own show. But I also do feel responsible as a professor of global history at Oxford, that I should be trying to push a little bit rather than sticking in my lanes. But not all my colleagues find that compelling or convincing. I've had conversations where, when this book came out, where one of my colleagues took me out for lunch and said, why don't you just stick to writing about stuff, you know, on the Silk Roads? And I said that that's fine. And maybe he's right, you know, And I walked home to me an hour, it's a 20 minute walk home. Took me an hour to walk back home walking circles, thinking, you know, maybe they're right, it would be a lot safer. People would understand it. They would get that I'm writing more about the Kazakhs or the Took men or the people I love working on, I still work on, but it's quite nice to, to try to push and to get that moment where your light bulb comes on, where someone tells you something about Prince Charles or King Charles as he's about to be, and you think, God, that's amazing to think like that. And throughout writing this book and researching, which has taken me 10 years, it's almost not a day, I don't find the E writing process easy. But there has not been a day gone by that I haven't read something by Corey Ross, by Nick Collater, by these amazing environmental historians who do, who work on different aspects and not, not feel completely lit up by thinking, isn't it a privilege to read what brilliant scholars write? And then, you know, reading scholars in the past, like Kalidasa, writing in Sanskrit around what it feels like to be caught in the rain on a hot day much more beautifully than I could ever write. And, you know, wondering, how do you, how do you put this into poetic form so that you're allowing Kalidas's voice to sing through? And then finding out who are the best translators of this poetry, who should you be referencing? And, you know, not just because I don't want colleagues to point a finger and go, you've picked the wrong translation, you should be using the one which, but it's, you know, doesn't take, doesn't take Too long to find that out too. But I love that discovery of trying to unlock things from the past. But you know, we do gatekeep as historians. We're very protective about methodology, about how we think we should be addressing things, and we're quite hectoring about telling each other what we should be doing, but I think we should, you know, go off and produce and write and it's not easy being in the public eye as a historian because, you know, it's great to do podcasts, but you know, you get a, of colleagues who, who don't like the idea that you're stepping onto their turf. You don't, you know, and we, we're pretty supportive, but we could maybe do a bit more.
- [22:02]
Javier Mejia
Are you optimistic? Are you. What, like regarding the field, do you think that this feudal element is going to persist in, in the humanities?
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Peter Frankopan
The single biggest problem, Javier, is early career scholars, because we can't get them onto the ladder. You know, the, the number of, I mean the, the, you know, I'm sure I would never have gotten a PhD position or PhD funding in today's world with the limited skills that I had 35 years ago compared to what it is that young scholars have. I think that creating more openings for, for junior scholars, for ones who are PhD in postdoctoral, not just spitting out after two or three years of postdocs where you're then consigned to sort of, you know, having to beg and pray for an opportunity. You know, I've seen lots of figures around the decline of history PhDs being granted. I've seen lots of stats that everyone will have seen from Stanford about how eight universities produce every single tenured history PhD in the United States, more or less. So that means it's really, really, really tough to get inclusivity. And ironically we're quite good at that at Oxford and you guys at Stanford at being doing inclusivity for the next generation of undergrads. You know, we're quite good at trying to make sure that we level the playing field. In fact, even maybe tilt it in ways that means that you don't just walk in if you're over privileged, you've got to earn your place extra hard. I'd say we're alpha minus on doing that. I'd say we're beta on how we do that. For graduate students, certainly in the UK and Oxford, we're definitely worse. But in my fields and the different fields I sit in, I look around the room and it's a lot of white people, mainly men. And so am I optimistic I think that we talk about diversity without doing too much about it. We talk about global histories. Often it's professors of French Revolutionary history. Please don't send me emails about it. I don't mean to pick on one subject, but you know, going to learn Kazakh or Uzbek or going to work on Khmer histories, you know, it's not easy and it does take time. It needs protection and it needs, it needs an. It needs opportunities to be given. And you know, it's partly that deans, I think it's deans in the US who do it. It's partly the administrators these days are slightly torn between working out are we a consumer service where we should be there to teach the undergrads, and we should teach the undergrads what they want to do, what to learn, Hitler, Second World War, Wall street crash, or should we be taking more of a deus ex machina view, which to say young people who are going to be smart in whatever walk of life, whether they're going to become bus drivers, teachers, NGO charity workers, chief executives, politicians, whatever it is, this is what we think smart young people should know about and how you should be taught how to think. And we're pretty good. In the uk, when you've been to Oxford and you've studied history, you can still become a lawyer, you can still become a banker or investment manager, you can still become whatever you like in the professional classes. But in Europe, it's a long time since that was the case. Now 90%, I think, are studying professional types of subjects, which narrows the field down and makes it more competitive, makes it more aggressive internally, and it's probably not that helpful. So for me, my focus is early career scholars and finding funding that allows for a good long run to be able to turn your PhD into a monograph and get yourself established in the field.
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Javier Mejia
I like your defense of a liberal arts type of training. I think that's essential and I think we're lucky that we're in places where that's possible.
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Peter Frankopan
You did that much better in the States, liberal arts. But it's the disengagement of the humanities and sciences and I'm the last generation of historian that will be able to do PhDs. I guess put it differently, my current PhD crop are the last generation of historians who'll be able to write a PhD without being able to include materials from genetic sampling around population for migrate. You can't write about migration anymore in the past without having genetic materials, at least for parts of the world that are wealthy and have that kind of Processing. So again in places like sub Saharan Africa, because the lack of investment in education, because of the legacies, the histories and so on, you know, it's, it's much less available. But you can't write about migration without thinking about genomics, you can't without looking at haplotypes. So you don't just rely on people say there were migrations, it's, you can measure from bones, you can look at present day population. So about 2018 of the population in northern India has shares a haplotype with populations in Scandinavia. And that's your starting point rather than some inscription that says people moved in this year because you can measure it. And historians, like you said in the first question, have, you can be quite uncomfortable about some of these things because we don't understand, don't price mathematical probability. Well, we don't understand it. So we don't know what clean data looks like. We don't know what kind of sample sizes are important. So liberal arts, you can take courses in the sciences, but it should be coming towards being mandatory. In the same way that we encourage graduate students that they need to learn languages, they also need to have training in how to understand plant sciences and biological sciences. And like I said, all these things are incredibly important and incredibly useful in allowing you to be able to, you know, look at computer modeling for example. And, and we're not, you know, it takes time to learn those skills. But you know, I had my students write an essay for me and, and when ChatGPT came out and I got, I said to them, I'm really disappointed none of you guys used it. I mean, why would you not try? Right? Because I'm certainly going to use ChatGPT markets and then I hope this isn't broadcast before the next set of essays, but I'm going to tell them off if they do use CHAT GPT. So you can't, you can never win against a professor because you're like the casino, you're always loading the dice. But you know, these new tools offer lots of challenges to us and to kind of lock them up and say you can't use them or you shouldn't use them or I don't understand them, I don't think is appropriate enough for senior scholars in elite institutions like mine. You know, there's the capacity for people my age to get trained how to do these things formally. And I've got colleagues who sit around my lunch table every day. I can go and go and sit in their classes with 18 year olds and learn from them. And to not do that, we seem to be crazy.
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Javier Mejia
Let me use that tone that you're describing here, that it's somewhat optimistic about the challenges that come with time to bring up. Make reference to something that it's quite interesting, I feel, in your book, because despite the fact that it makes reference to how constrained we are by environmental conditions, and frequently they're expressing catastrophic events, you seem to describe regularly the potential benefit that could come from those events. Right. So, and I've been thinking for the last couple of years a lot on collapse. I teach a course here called Societal Collapse. We talk about societies that fell apart. And most of that literature is very pessimistic. It's basically about how everything was destroyed and it has even a moral connotation to it. And one of the things that you.
- [29:29]
Peter Frankopan
Describe is, yeah, but that's also because we, as products of elitism, think about societal collapse in elite terms. So we hate when there are big buildings and temples. We love that stuff. Right. And when those fall apart, we get really upset. We talk about collapse. But the. I mean, which I'm sure you do in your class have you for the 80% of the population who are agricultural field workers, what does collapse mean? Right. Does that mean in some ways the societal collapse means that temples don't get built, that coerced labor doesn't get used or even even paid for labor in kind or in other forms. Is your lot better if you're on that 80% of the population to be liberated from exploitation? And the fact you don't need these big monuments is really bad for historians, because we love that stuff. It's bad for tourists who love that stuff too. Although actually ruin sites are incredibly popular. Right. But societal collapse depends on who that's, who that's for. And because we focus on elites and because we focus on the priesthoods and literate classes or people who are complaining about it, we tend not to think about things from below. So in a way, you know, the mainstream in most of historical topics are around how we need to move away from kings and queens into looking at sort of bottom up. But that's not translated into some of these big questions around empire and around and around how one figures what societies mean and you know, societal collapse, as I'm sure you were doing, I'm sure in your first lecture or first seminar we would talk about what that model means. What does it mean? What does society. What is collapse? And defining those things. It's a really tough thing because on the one hand, there's lots that's in common between the Maya world and the Silk Roads, for example, which I'm doing a parallel comparison at the moment. But at the same time it gets lots of people angry about global history, which is these things are completely different, totally different ecologies. The only thing that's in common is there are humans involved. And even then to generalize between structures and powers and production and agriculture and labor, all these things need to be very carefully qualified within individual spots, within locations, and also over time. Because one human's labor is not the same in one period and in another. Depends on what often what ecological conditions are like. If there's less rainfall, agriculture looks different, to if there's too much rainfall, to if it's stable conditions. So you're right, there's a big literature around societal collapse that's warning and apocalyptic. But, you know, I think we need to probably disengage from. I mean, I'm a little bit cagey about it in the book about collapse and try to talk about continuities and exchange. But, you know, it is also stepping away from the control of written sources. That's. That's the challenge here because we depend on those to hear the voices of the past. And when you either have complaints or they disappear, you know, my great city of, you see, I've gone slightly possessive. Not. It's not mine, the great city of Merv in Turkmenistan, you know, was. Was maybe the most populated city on earth in about 1200 maybe, you know, but certainly measured population, measured in the hundreds of thousands, you know, disappeared off the face of the Earth. So that kind of cataclysmic event is something different where it's sacked by the Mongols who managed to dismantle it without the use of gunpowder, which is really quite something in 1221 that is different to economic contraction, a slow sag and failure and the things that you would be talking about in your seminar. But we can be hopeful insofar as things get rebuilt and reborn from those ashes, because collapse doesn't mean the same thing to all people. It's really bad thing collapse. If you're elite and you're rich, it's maybe marginal if you're at the other end of the social and economic spectrum.
- [33:12]
Javier Mejia
Let me ask you to elaborate a bit on this continuity dimension that you explore in the book. And I think this, I'm sure this was not an unconscious decision. You call the book the Earth Transformed, right? And that specific transformation, like term has a very specific connotation precisely about things permanently changing. And that's the theme in the whole book. Right, but so how much of that is the result of this cataclysmic events versus everyday small changes? Right. How. What's the best model to think about social evolution? What's the balance between those two different types of sources of change?
- [34:06]
Peter Frankopan
It's a really good question. I think that, I mean I'm thinking on my feet rather than selling a product that feels like I've got ready. But I mean, I guess there's a difference between individual cataclysmic events which typically you have in the category of large scale volcanic eruptions that produce specific, either localized, regional or in some cases global effects. And there are quite a few examples that of that in prehistories before written histories been in human histories and in fact since as well. So there are lots of things one can pin onto individual moments. Typically pandemic disease fits into that same thunderclap event. We've seen that with coronavirus, but more specifically you see with Black Death and then also with the so called justinianic plague of the 530s and early 540s, which looks like it's highly influenced by a machine gun set of volcanic eruptions that go off over the course of about four or five years. And some organisms on our planet are highly sensitive to relatively small shifts. But again, what you need to spread disease, you need networks of trade particularly that spread the bad things too. So I think that you have these cataclysmic events that can happen then warfare, which often has a dimension around natural resources. I mean it's a little bit of a slightly oversimplification, but, but expansions of empire, I suppose in their most simple terms are around acquisition of ecological resources. It doesn't have to be crops or animals, but it often is. And it's often around access to resources, whether that's silver, whether that's manpower or human labor or no matter what. And so political and military expansions and the, the volatilities those produce in terms of mortality, in terms of famine, in terms of pressures on economic budgets that can send your revenues down and your costs up, can produce these moments of real compression that suddenly create a kind of single moment. But I think more often in the case of particularly declines of empire or states or networks is a long slow sag and long slow depressions, which are like a slow suffocation. So it's, it's not usually that empires go out like Darth Vader does in Star wars, you know, the Death Star blown to smithereens, in fact. Now they made so many flipping sequels. And it turns out there never ends the empire, right? It keeps on going. But you know, that's the kind of model I grew up with as a seven year old boy that, you know, that was the end point you1 well placed torpedo or whatever it was that he fired, Luke Skywalker fired and that's the end. But it all, it's always, it's always about SAG and it's always about trying to put bags of sand against the flood as it comes. And that can be quite successful for quite a long period of time, in many cases for decades if not centuries, fighting against the what looks like an inevitable tide. But so I think it's fitting those two together. The kind of single events or single moments of compression alongside, you know, the, the, the slow decline of resources that gets piece, you know, salami sliced away from you and, and then, and then you sort of disappear in a slow sad sort of crumple. And I think that those are two different models. And you know, even things like the collapse of the Maya, you know, there are still 9, 10 million Maya populations around in Central America. The last Maya location fell out, fell after Columbus reached long after Columbus and the Spanish had reached the Americas. So it all depends on how we historians want to frame these kinds of things. And we tend to think about let's say the Maya collapse in the 8th and 9th centuries and write off Chichen Itza and other sites that keep going quite successfully because they don't look as shiny as the Maya at their peak. Same with Rome. You know, we're not interested in Rome after 410 or 476 when the Western provinces saga, we used to call it the Dark Ages where you know, no one, no the literate, you know, literacy collapses, production of metals collapses, long distance trade disappears. And you know, that's very hard for historian to think about. We think there must be a bad quality of life and we wait for Charlemagne or, or better still to the time of the Crusades and then things start to look much more vibrant. But for the people who lived in these five or six hundred years, you know, it's, it's, it's questionable about what those changes and transformations mean. But transformation to me is a really important word because it allows for flexibility to fit all of these things rather than have a single cookie cutter, you know, model which sort of seems that you can force onto anything. Each one is different in their own different way. The toponymy is around how do you survive shocks and how sharp are those and what are the consequences if you do or if you don't.
- [39:01]
Javier Mejia
Let me ask you about that reaction to those shocks. Usually that. I mean, there are many ways in which humanity has adapted to the many different shocks that has experience. And you talk about that in the book very extensively. But I guess that probably the most effective one and the one in which we have relied our hope for modern threats has been technology. Right. What do you think has been the role of technology or technological progress, to be more precise. And how optimistic are you that it's a natural, real tool to help us deal with the environmental challenges that we're facing today?
- [39:45]
Peter Frankopan
What do you think?
- [39:48]
Javier Mejia
I mean, I have the impression that you're somewhat skeptical with what I feel. And this was interesting. It was very interesting to read that while being in the Silicon Valley, because here the. The ethos of the place is that technology is gonna save us. All. Right. I feel that you're somewhat skeptical about that. I think I sympathize with.
- [40:10]
Peter Frankopan
How do you read that as a historian?
- [40:14]
Javier Mejia
I. I mean, I think that we have. We're sort of puzzled by the fact that modernity has experienced such a singular type of technological progress that for the moment has been so profound and rapid and constant. And if we only pay attention to modern history, I think that we have the impression that we have figured out how to deal with the constraints of the environment just because we innovate. But whoever knows something about history beyond modernity should be concerned about that. Right. And periods of sustained innovation that have lasted for centuries, probably not as sharp as the one we have experienced, have existed in the past. Right. And we can think about classic antiquity, for instance. They have ended. They haven't been fully capable of addressing the challenges, many of those of. Of an environmental nature. So that's what feeds my skepticism. And I, again, I feel that you're a bit in line with probably that skeptical view. I don't know. And I'm also curious about how, from a personal perspective, have you dealt with this because. And that's. And you start the book with that. And you mentioned this before, how you grew up in this world full of anxieties and concerns about potential tragic ends of the world. And the period that followed was, if anything, somewhat optimistic and calm. Many of those threats seem to have disappeared, at least probably in the eyes of the public opinion. Maybe we leave now in different era with the different public opinions, in different mood. But yeah, I would like to hear your thoughts on that.
- [42:17]
Peter Frankopan
That's so interesting talking to have. Yeah, I mean, I'm due to Come to Stanford, I think next year. So it'd be great to have a cold beer or two and to talk it through. I'd learned so much talking to you and hearing your thoughts. I mean, it's very kind of you to ask me mine, but I mean, I think that those pace of technological changes obviously offers all sorts of potentials and solutions. And I suspect being a very boring historian, they'll offer slightly odd solutions in ways that are very hard to forecast and work out and in some cases will make something worse because that's how things tend to work. If you ask me though, which ones most likely, you know, there are people with a higher skill set, probably not too far away from Palo Alto who will think they have the answer to that and maybe they're even right. And I think that if I was to pull it back into a field that I know a little bit better, you know, your colleague at some point, Stanford, Francis Fukuyama, you know, he was not alone in thinking that when the Cold War ended, in fact it was before the Cold War, he wrote the End of History, the first article anyway. You know, that thinking that it was so obvious that communism was catastrophic was so obvious that the suppression of rights, that human rights persecutions and abuses were awful. It was obvious that economic depredation happened in parts of the world which had ideological means and that I think that's why his book was so important, his work was so important article in the book, so important and so persuasive. Because most people, I think, thought when the Cold War ended that this was a world that looked like we learned from the past, that there would be never a war in the same way that had happened in the 20th century. These catastrophic wars. Never would we persecute as it happened in the Holocaust. You know, we'd evolve past that stage. We'd learned these lessons, you know, we were convinced, I think that, you know, China join the WTO would lead to liberalization of, of life in China, from politics through the economy to society and well, you know, here we are again. If we've been talking before the pandemic or before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we might be saying something different. But it would look to me that we're quite good at convincing ourselves of all the good stuff, that we're bound to be able to solve problems. And I would probably think the technology would follow the political path of looking optimistic, seeing things that look completely self evidential, that we should of course all be democratic, we should all respect each other's opinions, we should all Be able to disagree with each other, but vote for who we want. And yet, you know, even in my country and your country, both called United States, United Kingdom, you know, these are two, two deeply divided countries between red and blue in both sides, where half a country thinks the other half are idiots. And, and that's. That that's very dangerous. And so I suspect with technology, thinking we can solve things doesn't help the fact that the Rhine last year dried to the point that shipping had to stop. Technology didn't help the fact that Sichuan province, which is 80% of its power in China, Sichuan province is one of the big industrial and tech, not quite Silicon Valley parallels, but it's an important tech production center in China. 80% of its energy comes from hydroelectric. And last summer, all factories closed for three weeks, including ones producing parts for Apple. Again, not located too far away from where you are sitting right now, because there was no energy to power, to power the factories, including the air conditioning, let alone the production lines. So, you know, I think that technology will come to the aid in lots of ways. It's whether it'll come quickly and also who it'll come to. And you know, we saw that again with the pandemic, where logically we would have thought, we're all in this together, we should vaccinate globally, the population as fast as possible. My own university, which was behind the AstraZeneca vaccine, distributed its vaccines for free globally. We took zero profit from it. The other big pharmaceutical companies that I don't need to name on our podcast, monetize that for tens of billions of dollars each to the, to the benefit of their shareholders, pension funds, etc. And research, of course, benefits from that too. That's going to be folded into graduate scholarships, maybe even for the liberal arts and history, who knows? But the distribution of vaccines into again, the clumsy label of the developing world, or in particular to states in Africa, meant that there's been huge resistance in many African states to condemn Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Because the view was that we bought in the UK eight times more vaccines than we needed. We distributed them late, without cold chain in some cases, for the, for some of the, some of the vaccines that was required. And that again, with climate technologies, it's what are those going to mean to the poorest people on Earth? Who, of course, the ones least responsible for anthropogenic change, whether that's pollution, warming, degradation of the landscape, et cetera. And you know, looking at populations in Africa in particular, but also in Southeast Asia, in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, which is, take those four countries together, you're pushing almost a billion people. You know, that's they're very remote in some cases from technologies available in, on the west coast of the United States. And scalability is all very well and good. Lots of these countries, of course, have highly developed tech sectors too. But capital is what's required to scale and the access to capital in so called emerging markets is a real barrier to being able to roll out at scale things people need quickly enough. And the fact that we're having these conversations now rather than 20 years ago or 40 years ago. I write about, in my book about people warning about climatic changes in the 1850s, measure measuring carbon dioxide being released into the oxygen, anxieties around climate and degradation in the 20th century. The fact that tech hasn't solved them yet or really worked hard enough to bring about major and important changes tells its own story. So there may well be golden horizons coming towards us and wonderful solutions. I really hope for all of our sakes that there will be. But we should have been solving these and investing into that a long time in the past. And we're quite good at solving problems. But cost of capital is obviously one big barrier. But working out who gets the first benefits is going to be important. And I'm pretty cynical about that because if you learn one thing about history, the people who build the temples and have the biggest palaces and build walls are never the guys at the bottom of the social and economic heap. And in a democracy that equation doesn't work. It's fine in a feudalistic society or whatever our new word for neo feudal might be baronial economies, but it's not good in a country where you've got tens or hundreds of millions of people who are dispossessed and getting poorer and climate stressed.
- [48:54]
Javier Mejia
Peter, this has been great. I'm very inspired by this conversation. My students will have to listen to this next quarter. But I want to thank you. I want to thank you for writing this great book and challenging the opposition of, of your colleagues. It's a very insightful book.
- [49:17]
Peter Frankopan
My colleagues are great. I've never met a historian I don't like. You know, I think it's totally understandable that when people look like you've got a big profile, it feels threatening. But actually it should also be a source of optimism that amazingly people around the world, including people who are not students or colleagues, they really do read books about history and they read things that are quite obtuse, quite densely written. I've got nearly 4,000 footnotes in my book, you know, that should be a real inspiration, I think, to academic historians that there is a space there that people will take serious history. And you know, it's not just the marketing, which, you know, we'll have another conversation about. That book has to look nice with a nice cover. But, you know, it's. Are you able to, when you get a chance to talk on a podcast like yours, have you with a senior and distinguished colleagues, you know, it's, do you say things that inspire for a second follow up? And if you can inspire that in your colleagues, you can inspire that in your students, then you can do that in general public. And it's, how do we all learn from each other? And no, I've had only support, but I do know that it feels like a tall poppy because writing this stuff and being interviewed and talking, it takes a lot of time, but it's a joy to do if it's with clever, smart people. So the collegiate side of what we do is great. I think we could be much better towards diversity. I think we're much better at supporting early career scholars and we could be a bit more supportive of each other in working out how to recognize the challenges we're trying to overcome and address.
- [50:43]
Javier Mejia
That's a great message to end this conversation. It'd be great if you come next year. I'll invite you to my class and let's try to talk soon.
- [50:52]
Peter Frankopan
How many will be in your class? I was about to say I'll buy them all a beer if they come, but there might be a lot of them and that. And beer in the States is quite expensive these days.
- [51:00]
Javier Mejia
Yeah, but it would be great. I usually have some of my classes. So this quarter is 35 students. That's very large for a seminar.
- [51:08]
Peter Frankopan
But yeah, you know, that is the best thing. You can hear that these young people who could pick any subject come and study with you, you know, that's, that's a real testimony to your leadership, your vision and your engaging with students. Because like I did with the Norfolk petty gentry and minor aristocrats, students are smart, they walk with their feet, they work with, they vote with their feet and they'll go find another class. So if they keep coming to you, then, then you're doing the right thing.
- [51:35]
Javier Mejia
Yeah, I think I'm doing just what you're saying. Exploding this opportunity of people being really interested in, in this topic. So thank you for leading, leading the way, Peter. And well, I hope you're great success with, with the book.
- [51:49]
Peter Frankopan
Thanks so much. Pleasure speaking to you, Javier. Thank you, Sam.