Gondwanaland

Modern Histories of an Ancient Supercontinent

This remarkable book shows that the ways people think about the earth is different too. From South Africa to central India, from Argentinian Patagonia to the Australian Outback, Gondwanaland recreates an ancient supercontinent as a lived reality uniting past and present. This landmark volume provides a new vision of the history of the earth sciences and moves it to the center of global history.
Jim Secord, University of Cambridge

The ancient landmass of Gondwanaland began to break up 200 million years ago into what would become present-day Africa, Antarctica, Australasia, South America, and South Asia—a prehuman “Global South” connected territorially across the southern hemisphere. Named by European geologists in the nineteenth century after the Gondwana region in central India, Gondwanaland has spawned rich and unexpected histories in which the supercontinent has been mythologized and reinvented in response to contemporary geopolitical circumstances. Bridging history, geography, and the geosciences, this volume analyzes the multidimensional interpretations of Gondwanaland in the modern world, tracing its diverse resonances and legacies in politics, science, culture, and the environment across five continents. By reassembling Gondwanaland into a hemispheric history of the southern Earth, this collection considers how deep geological pasts continue to inform geographical and political imaginaries into the present.

376 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

October, 2026

isbn : 9780822968160

about the editors

Alison Bashford

Alison Bashford is Scientia professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

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Alison Bashford
Pratik Chakrabarti

Pratik Chakrabarti is the National Endowment for the Humanities Cullen Chair in History and Medicine at the University of Houston.

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Pratik Chakrabarti
Jarrod Hore

Jarrod Hore is a Scientia Lecturer in the School of Humanities & Languages at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

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Jarrod Hore