SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY TRIVEDI SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2025, BSHS PICKSTONE PRIZE 2026 & Wolfson History Prize 2026

A GUARDIAN & TELEGRAPH BEST SCIENCE BOOK 2025

WATERSTONES BEST POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK 2025

From an award-winning historian of race, science and empire, a path-breaking and poignant history of extinction as a scientific idea, an imperial legacy and a political choice

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed 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 – and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. 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 determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable.

Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion 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.

Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

'A vital and important book' David Olusoga

"Highly readable and academically rigorous... traces the entanglements of race, empire and colonialism to better understand extinction" - Guardian

"Dark, persuasive, detailed, poetic… exquisitely attuned to the (often overlooked) historical and political contexts in which scientific ideas thrive" - Financial Times

"Qureshi’s definitive account demonstrates that histories of extinction, empire, race and genocide must be written and read together... Acknowledging extinction’s unnatural history may help us choose otherwise" - TLS

"Groundbreaking" - Nature

"Qureshi’s rigorous, fascinating narrative traces how understanding the regrettable impermanence of species such as the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger was reformulated, by dull minds in powerful places, into a justification for exploitation" - Telegraph Greatest Books of 2025

"A poignant, compassionate exploration of the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire. Professor Qureshi skilfully interweaves fascinating original research and compelling storytelling to show us that extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future" - Forbes

"Vital... a breathtaking account of extinction" - New Indian Express