Indian writer Amitav Ghosh delivered a series of lectures on what he perceived was the lack of coverage of climate change in contemporary fiction at the University of Chicago in 2015.

In the final section, Politics, Ghosh notes that activists who single out capitalism as the systemic driver of climate change miss an important element: imperialism.

[4] In his review for The Guardian, Pankaj Mishra says, "How such 'progress' changes the global environment is revealed, along with other true faces of easternisation, by Ghosh in his short but broad-ranging and consistently stimulating indictment of our era of the 'great derangement'".

The review praised the book's ambition, but criticised it for not discussing climate change in science fiction, and was mixed on its structure.

"[6] In a review for the Journal of International Affairs, Astha Ummat gives a strong positive review for The Great Derangement, noting that Ghosh "supplements his thoughts with hard facts and figures" and "maintains the fine balance between technical complexities of the science of climate change and how climate change can in fact also be seen as a crisis of culture."