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.
This paper contends that recent scholarly interest in systems of colonising knowledge, whether called ‘scientific forestry,’ or ‘development,’ has paid inadequate attention to the historical processes shaping such knowledge production in specific colonial locations.
Professional German foresters played an important role in shaping the course of forest management in India during the last century. It is to Sir Dietrich Brandis that the credit for the introduction of scientific methods of management is given…
The Kautiliya Arthasastra is a famous treatise on state-craft which within its state policies includes ecological concerns…
Recent and current environmental legislation in Nepal is described, and its relation to sustainable development analysed.
The science of palynology has proved to be a good tool to reconstruct the past, to build up archaeological scenarios and to record climatic changes during the Holocene period. However, the terms employed to denote climate, like arid and humid, are often used without proper definitions, ignoring intricacies of climate…
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 efforts of both anthropologists and historians have been weakened by a failure to take into account what the other half were doing…
This paper discusses changes in land and vegetation cover and natural resources of the Cape Verde Islands since their colonisation by the Portuguese around 1460.
