Vanished

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever lived are now extinct. Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept. In Europe until the late 18th century, species were considered perfect & unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to piece together that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth. Extinction went from being viewed as theologically dangerous to pervasive, even natural. Yet Europeans & Americans quickly used the idea that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution & genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. This book explores the tangled & unnatural histories of extinction & empire.