For a long time, the British Empire saw the climate and the regional political strongholds of northeast India as insuperable obstacles to conquest.
Explores how the relationship of Adivasis to their surroundings was gradually reshaped under colonial rule in Bengal, leading to increased sedentarization of Adivasis through the extension of cultivation.
Looks at the changing governance practices towards agro-ecological resources and the political response that it received from the agrarian community in colonial eastern Bengal.
After traders from East India Company discovered Assam’s wild tea plants in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the commodification of this resource in the eastern border of Bengal radically transformed the ecological condition of the region.
The exploitation of the cheap manual labor provided by Adivasis and the appropriation of their indigenous environmental knowledge has enabled and equally influenced environmental governance at the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary since colonial times.
A reflection on the challenges of doing environmental history research in the diverse region of the Himalayas.
This issue of RCC Perspectives uses mountains as a common denominator around which to discuss overarching challenges of environmental history: challenges relating not only to mountain landscapes, but also to broader questions of sources, methods, cross-cultural research, project scale, and audience. Each author discusses some of their most intriguing discoveries, resulting in a brief and diverse collection of environmental history snapshots.
British perceptions of the 1874 famines in India and the Ottoman Empire were shaped by discourses that defined these regions as spaces of absence, scarcity, wilderness, or empty land in desperate need of colonial investment and opportunity.
Bringing together scholarship from across the globe, this volume of RCC Perspectives aims to shed light and stimulate discussion on the past, present, and future of the “unruly” environments that frustrate efforts at social and environmental control.
This paper considers Cherrapunji, a sleep hilltop village in the remote northeastern frontier of India discovered through the colonial search for a cool place for European sensibilities.
