Peter Frankopan Interviewed by David Isaac

Historian Professor Peter Frankopan explains that efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history and that our engagement with the natural world and climatic change is nothing new.

Frankopan explores how the development of religion and language is related to the environment, how growing demands for harvests led to increased shipment of enslaved people, and how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus is at the origins of the bureaucratic state. Frankopan says it is essential today that we understand how past shifts in natural patterns have shaped history and how we have previously shaped terrestrial, marine and atmospheric conditions.

Frankopan is professor of global history at the University of Oxford. He is author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, named one of the books of the decade 2010-202 by the Sunday Times, and of The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World, winner of the human sciences prize of the Carical Foundation. He will talk for 35 minutes before taking questions led by the Provost of Worcester College David Isaac.

Previous Provost of Worcester College Lectures have been given by Ed Miliband, Professor Philippe Sands, Sir Antony Sher and Sir Ian McKellan.