Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
An interdisciplinary explanation of why Europeans and people of European descent have come to control so much of the world’s wealth.
An interdisciplinary explanation of why Europeans and people of European descent have come to control so much of the world’s wealth.
This book engages debates on the timing and location of the agricultural revolution by focusing on the process of enclosure in the southern English counties of Dorset, Hampshire, Sussex, and Wiltshire.
Stoll traces the origins of nineteenth-century conservation, which grew out of a rich and heated discussion, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, about soil fertility, plant nutrition, and livestock management. More fundamental than any other resource, soil “became the focal point for a conception of nature as strictly limited.” The problem gave rise to a major disagreement about the wisdom of territorial expansion.
Most contributors to Agrarmodernisierung und Ökologische Folgen deal with the ecological consequences of farming and agriculture in twentieth-century Germany.
Taking a historical, cross-cultural, and trans-disciplinary perspective, this e-book includes some of the most recent references in the scholarly and policy literature on food, agriculture, environment, and livelihoods. The photos and the embedded video clips, animations, and audio recordings show farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, fishers, food workers, urban farmers, and consumers all working to promote food sovereignty, highlighting the importance of locally controlled food systems to sustain people and nature in a diversity of rural and urban contexts.
Highland Sanctuary unravels the complex interactions among agriculture, herding, forestry, the colonial state, and the landscape in the Usambara mountains of Tanzania.
Brian Donahue offers an innovative, accessible, and authoritative history of the early farming practices of Concord, Massachusetts.
Napier Shelton offers a tour of notable natural sites in Missouri through the eyes of the people who work with them.
Managing the Unknown offers essays that show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress. This volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.