Colonialism and the Climate Crisis: Rethinking Legacies and Trajectories

The imperial and colonial contexts in which modern science and scholarship came of age haunt us to this day. Be it the origin of museum collections, the Eurocentrism of history textbooks and academic curricula, or the lack of minority ethnic university staff—the shadows of an imperial past loom large upon us today.

The German Historical Institute London is proud to collaborate with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation on a new lecture series on Science, Knowledge, and the Legacy of Empire consisting of eight lectures over fours years. Join us for the seventh lecture of the series given by Sunil Amrith (Yale) on 14 October 2025 at 34 Belgrave Square. He will talk about "Colonialism and the Climate Crisis: Rethinking Legacies and Trajectories".

This lecture examines the tangled paths that connect the history of colonialism to the climate crisis. A lot of recent work on ‘climate and colonialism’ focuses on the straight line that links colonial-era resource extraction, in service of an expanding European industrial capitalism, to the long-term commodification of nature and fossil fuel dependency that lie at the root of our current environmental catastrophes. To this we must add the inverse relationship: it was the widespread sense that colonial rule had held back economic development and resource exploitation that led so many postcolonial leaders to emphasize speed in their quest to catch up—and with speed came an addiction to top-down environmental transformation that has heightened, not reduced, local vulnerability to growing risks. It is in the intersection of both trajectories—colonialism as origin; and colonialism as injury to be overcome at any cost—that we can understand the extent of climate inequality in the world today. The final part of the lecture adds a third, often neglected, dimension to our reckoning with climate crisis and colonial legacies. One of the most enduring legacies of decolonization, in a warming world, has to do with how it shaped people’s access to mobility: the question of who can move where, and under what conditions. As more and more parts of the world are stretched to the limits of habitability, this deep inequality in access to mobility will have profound consequences.

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, and Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is also the Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Amrith is the author of five books, most recently The Burning Earth (W.W. Norton and Allen Lane, 2024), selected as a ‘book of the year’ by The New Yorker and The New Statesman in 2024. It is being translated into ten languages, with the German translation to appear with C. H. Beck in March 2025. Amrith is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the 2022 Heineken Prize in History, a 2022 Falling Walls ‘Scientific Breakthrough of the Year’ award, and the 2024 Fukuoka Academic Prize for distinguished contributions to the study of Asian cultures. In 2024 he was elected an International Fellow of the British Academy.

This lecture will be repeated at Trinity College Dublin on 14 October 2025.