Yale Professor Sunil Amrith Wins British Academy Book Prize

Photo:Yale University.

India-West News Desk

NEW HAVEN, CT – Yale University historian, Professor Sunil Amrith has been named the winner of the 2025 British Academy Book Prize for ‘The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years’.

The judges called the book “magisterial” and “beautifully written,” agreeing that it “exemplifies the spirit of the prize: to deepen understanding of our world.” Amrith becomes the 13th winner of the non-fiction award, which recognizes work that searches for truth and reason in difficult places.

Amrith’s prize-winning work offers a panoramic account of the last 500 years, detailing how human ambition has transformed the planet and, in turn, how the planet has shaped human history. It spans continents and centuries, tracing how extraction and empire forged the modern world—from Portuguese silver mines in Peru to British gold fields in South Africa, and from colonial railways to oil pipelines in Central Asia.

His extensive research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia, now expanded to global environmental history, migration, and public health.

At 47, Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment at the Yale School of the Environment. He also serves as Yale’s Vice Provost for International Affairs.

Before joining Yale, he was the inaugural Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University (2015-20), where he also co-directed the Joint Center for History and Economics.

Prior to Harvard, he taught at Birkbeck College at the University of London. Amrith, who grew up in Singapore, received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge.

His four previous books include ‘Unruly Waters’, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and ‘Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants’, an Editor’s Choice title by the New York Times Book Review. His next book, ‘Repair’, will be the subject of his Wiles Lectures in 2026.