Civilisation pollutes. Every improvement will bring poison and entropy in its wake. Apparently infinite resources are always finite. Immediate gain is inevitable loss. Lip service to ideals of balance and moderation is as old as humanity and has never been enough.

Peter Frankopan’s story of our relationship to the world across all planetary space and human time is necessarily vast – 660 pages of text, with footnotes relegated to 212 pages online – in which the grand cycle is enacted again and again. Enterprise, vision, cultivation, expansion, connection, brutality, dominance, exploitation, overstretch, sclerosis, inadequacy, failure, disaster, death and collapse follow one another, all of them patiently queuing up like customers at the shop of life, waiting for their moment at the till, only to slope round to the back of the queue and start the cycle again.

The world is the theatre for this binge-worthy drama, every episode in all the continents playing its variation on the repeated themes. The oscillations of the climate are the Dei ex machina, not unlike the terrifying ancient gods, often strangely and unpredictably beneficent, providing, sometimes for centuries at a time, conditions in which people can be well and happy (weather in the Roman empire was largely sunny and warm, as it was again in Europe from 800-1200), and then turning without warning wilfully destructive, suddenly enraged, imposing flood, drought, famine and plague on a scale that shrinks human life to an ant-like cowering under the rocks of a brutal world.

Volcanoes are the unexpected killers. Their spewing of ash into an atmosphere whose winds distribute it around the globe has repeatedly destroyed summers, devastated crops, induced famines and collapsed societies. It may well be that a series of vast eruptions in Iceland in the 1780s not only crushed agricultural production across the world – there is evidence from Russia, Egypt, India and Japan – but lay behind the discontent that blew up at the end of the decade in the French Revolution. (It also provided the unexpected rainfall that allowed Captain Bligh not to die of thirst when cast adrift from the Bounty.) It is not particularly encouraging that, as Frankopan says, ‘the clock is now ticking faster’ on the prospect of another vast, world-darkening eruption in the near future. We have not had one since 1815, and evidence is gathering that the shrinking of glaciers and ice sheets may release the volcanic forces the weight of ice previously constrained. The possibility of a volcanic winter lurks on the horizon.

But for all the recognition of the potency of climate, this is not a determinist history. From the very beginning, human beings have been actors in their own drama and responsible for large parts of their fate. Elasticity and inventiveness always win. Rigidity always fails, and so, for example, when the Qing dynasty began to collapse in late 18th-century China, beset by climate-induced crop failures, hunger and massive popular discontent, the contemporary administration in Japan, experiencing the same physical conditions, survived with no such difficulty.

Riding the waves of mutability has always been possible if the frame of mind in government and society is adequately supple and responsive. Reliance on ancient nostrums, and expectations that old solutions will remain good enough, are almost inevitably fatal. Civilisations that become dependent on large, widespread and complex supply networks and reciprocal markets usually generate their own fragilities. If one part of such a network fails, the effects cascade in a series of chain reactions through all apparently powerful participants in the system. The end of the Bronze Age c.1200 BC, perhaps triggered by drought in Anatolia, may have precipitated one such domino collapse, as the Hittite empire, the Mycenaeans, the Mesopotamian states and Pharaonic Egypt all either fell apart or shrank to an unrecognisable impotence. And yet soon enough, out of their ashes, appeared the brutally assertive Assyrian empire, stimulating the Phoenicians and then the Greeks to thrive in its margins.

These successive tides of power and failure are the constants of Frankopan’s book, which nevertheless navigates through oceans and continents of fine detail. Long and careful accounts of agricultural systems, mentalities and intellectual change rely on wide-ranging (if almost entirely Anglophone) sources. Evidence from the uranium-thorium chronology, leaf wax biomarker hydrogen isotopes and the analysis of faecal stools take their place alongside conventional economic and social history. The result is a dazzling compendium of global research. It is one of the ironies of our civilisation that our massive imposition on, and distortion of, the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere is accompanied by an unprecedentedly wide-ranging understanding of exactly what we have done. No disaster has ever been more expertly curated.

The length at which Frankopan treats this history expands, and the pace slows, as he approaches the present day. The hinge, inevitably, comes with the Industrial Revolution. Until the end of the 18th century, humanity was, except in local detail, a recipient of the world’s nature. Up to and including the general crisis of the 17th century, in which a deteriorating climate imposed war, poverty and suffering on a large part of humanity across the globe, people could not act on a scale to match the powers of the planet. Biologists have shown that fertility, life expectancy and the survival of the young among pre-industrial human beings was almost identical to the life prospects of modern albatrosses in the southern ocean. We were in one way simply another species.

From the late 18th century onwards, above all in north-west Europe and then in America, the concatenation of ‘men, science, money and opportunity’ began to drive an unprecedented dynamic and aggressive change. The stability and good weather of the 18th century had allowed Qing, Mughal, Bourbon and Hanoverian regimes all to thrive, but China and India, more settled and less anxiously aggressive than Europe, did not take off in the way that the Continent’s empires did.

Frankopan’s account of this change is ferocious and impassioned. In his hands, the triumph of the West, with the unconscionable horrors of the Atlantic slave trade at its heart, takes on the appearance of an alarming fusion of Faust and Midas. For centuries, Europeans felt they could do no wrong. They could use the world, its people and beauties. They could transform it as they wished, shifting its plants, animals and populations where they wanted, and there would be no consequences. Or at least, as in those two myths of the cult of ‘entitlement’ – a word Frankopan repeatedly uses of the transforming empires – the consequences were hidden from the perpetrators.

His story of destruction over the past two centuries is one of arrogant myopia which led in the 20th century to ‘a sequence of catastrophes unparalleled both in human history and in that of the natural world. The suffering of the past 100 years has been by far the greatest in recorded history in terms of its scale and its horror’.

The assumption that man must conquer nature was allied to the capital and industrialised capacity to bring it about. Humanity became its own climate. Its own actions created the world in which it lived. It did indeed reshape nature, with the intention of bending it to its advantage, and as a result devised a kind of toxic prison, an outcome whose distant ancestor is the inadvertent poisoning with salt of the irrigated fields of ancient Mesopotamia. ‘The world of today and tomorrow,’ he says straightforwardly, ‘looks terrifying.’ We are at ‘the edge of a precipice where the future of our species is at risk’.

The value of this book is as an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena – not dominators of the Earth but products of it. Bleakly and soberingly, Frankopan recognises from the long line of precedents that the prospects are for a world of war and suffering. The destructive changes are already ‘baked in’. Success does not breed success, he says, but more often than not ‘sows the seeds of ruin’.