After the Flood

An incisive and thorough examination of how complex, natural philosophical discourse developed around Noah's Flood in the early modern period. This is cultural and intellectual history at its best, and it should attract a wide readership.

Nuanced and beautifully crafted. After the Flood reveals the surprisingly long history of the idea that humanity is capable of transforming nature on a global scale—an idea commonly assumed to be a twenty-first-century insight. Making use of an impressive range of archival sources, Barnett's scholarship is original, wide-ranging, and erudite.

In this dazzlingly original and deeply researched book, Lydia Barnett demonstrates how debates in early modern Europe about the causes of the Deluge stimulated arguments about anthropogenic climate change. This is a major contribution to the growing literature on the historical roots of the Anthropocene. It is also an important reminder that the religious imagination grappled with planetary scale long before the advent of earth system science.

Laying waste to received environmental ideas, After the Flood delivers a strikingly original account of a seemingly recent notion: that humans are responsible for the earth's destruction. This extraordinary book weaves together imperial expeditions, theological wars, and early scientific networks to rediscover the natural and human history of a vulnerable planet.