Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90 percent of species that ever lived are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction?

Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to piece together that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth. Extinction went from being viewed as theologically dangerous to pervasive, even natural.

Yet Europeans and Americans quickly used the idea that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion.

Weaving together pioneering original research and breath-taking narrative storytelling, Vanished explores the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire.