"Editorial" for Environment and History 2, no.2, South Asia special issue (June, 1996)
Introduction to a special issue that reflects the rapid growth of research in environmental history now apparent throughout the South Asian region.
Introduction to a special issue that reflects the rapid growth of research in environmental history now apparent throughout the South Asian region.
Two broad themes taken up in the literature will be the focus of this essay: how far colonialism was an ecological watershed, and how producers responded to new pressures. The third issue is of what we can or should learn (or unlearn) from the colonial experience.
There seems little doubt that many environmental historians, this editor included, have tended to fall into a veritable elephant trap of simplistic polarities when they deal, as they increasingly are doing, with the unwieldy but vital subject of the colonial impact on the tropical environment and its people…
The study of history in a sense that can be called ‘environmental’ is a discipline yet to be created in Latin America. This has become an obstacle that must be overcome if we are to understand better the serious social and environmental deterioration of the region.
After yellow fever was firmly ensconced via an ecological reconfiguration connected to sugar (c. 1640–90) it underpinned a military and political status quo, keeping Spanish America Spanish. After 1780, and particularly in the Haitian revolution, yellow fever undermined that status quo by assisting independence movements in the American tropics.
During the 1840s, the biometric approach to soil fertility appraisal was found to be a false one, and was replaced by a developing ecological one, which relied on specific plant indicators of soil fertility.
This paper explores some routes into the history of plant transfers, especially during the period of European imperialism.
This two-part paper examines the origins, spread, and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
The second part of this two-part paper looks at the influence on forestry of knowledge and management practices exchanged through professional-scientific networks.
This book is a collection of papers from one of the first major US conferences on environmental history, which took place 1–3 January 1982 at the University of California’s Irvine campus, and brought together over 100 scholars active in the field.