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Vanished
An Unnatural History of Extinction
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Brief Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY TRIVEDI SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2025 & BSHS PICKSTONE PRIZE 2026 A GUARDIAN & TELEGRAPH BEST SCIENCE BOOK 2025 WATERSTONES BEST POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK 2025 'A vital and important book' - David Olusoga From an award-winning historian of race, science and empire,...
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Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY TRIVEDI SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2025 & BSHS PICKSTONE PRIZE 2026
A GUARDIAN & TELEGRAPH BEST SCIENCE BOOK 2025
WATERSTONES BEST POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK 2025
'A vital and important book' - David Olusoga
From an award-winning historian of race, science and empire, Vanished offers 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 devastating 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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780141988566
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 27 August 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 23.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 334g
Pages: 496
About the Author
Sadiah Qureshi is a writer and historian of science, race and empire. Currently a Chair of Modern British History at the University of Manchester, she has written for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman. She cannot bear the thought of living in a world without trees or tigers.
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Vanished
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