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Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction cover

Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction

Sadiah Qureshi

0

awards won

6

score

#1403 of 3,809 books · #541 in History

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize (2026) and the Royal Society Science Book Prize (2025).

Vanished was shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize 2025 and BSHS Pickstone Prize 2026, and was a Guardian, Telegraph, and Waterstones best science book of 2025. From an award-winning historian of race, science and empire, a path-breaking and poignant history of extinction as a scientific idea, an imperial legacy and a political choice. Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of 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 devasting 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 breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

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Publisher
Random House
ISBN-13
9780241352113
Genre
History
Topics
Extinction and evolutionary scienceColonialism and empireHistory of science

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