In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. Sixty years on, in 2007, after many readjustments, it was set at five minutes before the final bell. The reasons given by the scientists included – for the first time – new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology, and the threat of climate change. In 2010, with some evidence of movement towards arms and climate control, the Clock was taken back to six minutes to midnight. The scientists declared: ‘For the first time in decades we have an opportunity to free ourselves from the terror of nuclear weapons and to slow drastic changes to our shared global environment.’ They encouraged ‘scientists to continue their engagement with these issues and make their analysis widely known’, and were confident enough to assert, ‘We are poised to bend the arc of history.’ It is unlikely that they would include among ‘scientists’ the custodians of ‘the arc of history’, and even less likely that most historians would want to include themselves. However, this book takes the contrary view, arguing for the necessity of history as a science in a pandisciplinary response to the ongoing crisis.

It begins with the onset of the Anthropocene Era – the geological phase in which a global impact has been made by human activities. The era began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when available data indicate the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several ‘greenhouse gases’. This period includes James Watt's fundamental improvement of the steam engine, the event central to the Industrial Revolution that transformed the face of the world and began to pollute it.

Watt's achievement is the point of departure for this book, which seeks to describe some significant aspects of the coincidence of geological time with historical time. It has three major interlocking aims: (1) to note major advances in the natural sciences and their applications; (2) to set out an analytical narrative of the Anthropocene Era; (3) to pay particular attention to the development of history as an academic discipline in association with other humanities, the social and natural sciences, illustrating its response to the changing circumstances of successive periods.