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THE suggestion that we have entered a new geological era, the ‘Anthropocene’, an era in which humans for the first time must be counted as global agents, or drivers of change, cannot have escaped the attention of readers of Seminar. The assertion of a new form of agentive force for our species is subject to challenge in empirical terms, a point I discuss below. Evaluating the empirical sufficiency of the idea that significant human impact on the earth system is relatively recent is the subject of an ongoing research project to collate and commensurate historical, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental evidence regarding the actual contours of the global human footprint (that is, a data-based rather than model-based reconstruction). While empirical sufficiency is important, the form that the Anthropocene debate takes is also of interest. In this essay, I discuss the somewhat hidden Eurocentrism of the Anthropocene concept. To a surprising extent, the notion of an Anthropocene–and much of the analytical apparatus surrounding it–represents an effort to expand (rather homogenized) European historical experiences, frameworks and chronologies onto the rest of the world. I take the term Eurocentrism here literally, in that existing mod-