‘He makes history a smart art’ (The Times) ‘in a class of his own for serious scholarship’ (The Spectator). Reviewers liken him to Gibbon, Toynbee, Braudel and (as a food writer) Brillat-Savarin (The New York Times).

He has been short-listed for the UK’s most valuable literary prize. Honours include The Caird Medal, the John Carter Brown Gold Medal, a Fellowship of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the Union Pacific Visiting Professorship (University of Minnesota), and membership of the Faculties of the World Economic Forum and the European Technology Forum. Broadcasting credits include regular presenting of Radio 4's Analysis, screenwriting and presenting for BBC 2 and Channel 4 and screenwriting for CNN's ten-part adaptation of his book, MILLENNIUM.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto lectures at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and is Visiting Professor of Global Environmental History at Queen Mary College, London.

Explorers forged the infrastructure of global history, first by finding the routes of migration that sundered human cultures, then - after millennia of divergence - by finding the routes that linked them up again.

PATHFINDERS tells the epic story of how the route-finders did it: who they were, where they came from, where they went, how they coped with the unknown, how they developed the techniques and technologies they needed, how they paid for it, how they suffered for it, and - perhaps most curious of all - why they bothered.

From the earliest migratory wanderings that scattered human societies across the planet to the great voyages of discovery that started linking them up again, and finally to the conquering of the final geographical frontiers in the twentieth century, Fernandez-Armesto reveals the real flesh-and-blood, the vainglory and fantasy that motivated the pathfinders of the world.