In 2012, violence between Buddhists and Muslims erupted in western Myanmar, pointing to a growing divide between religious communities that before had received little attention from the outside world.

In this gripping and deeply reported account, Francis Wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite has laid the foundations for mass violence, and how, in Myanmar’s case, some of the most respected voices for democracy have turned on the minorities at a time when the majority of citizens are beginning to experience freedoms unseen for half a century.

Author: Philipp Lehmann

From the 1870s to the mid-20th century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate. Uncovering this history, “Desert Edens” looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering.

From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis.

Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea.