Australia and New Zealand share a southern, settler society history, and cultural solidarity as British colonies and dominions. Their early unity as ‘Australasia’ is where this paper begins, focusing on the strong role of science in shaping environmental history and policy in both countries.
This paper shows how the story of Alpine milk illustrates that in premodern times food production reflected much more the connection between local land resources and farmer’s skills, tools, and practices—a link that has ceased to exist in the mindset of industrialised societies.
This article examines a series of projects and discussions among the Enlightenment elite in the Danish kingdom, that relate to the need for technological improvement and agricultural reform in Iceland, a distant province of the Danish state in the eighteenth century.
Controversy over the claim that sugar depleted the soil and stunted subsequent rice crops reached a stalemate when both sugar scientists and their critics were accused of selectively choosing evidence according to political bias…
The author’s own research into the early years of European settlement plots an evolving cultural engagement with the indigenous environment, and in particular with forest or ‘bush,’ which ran parallel with its extensive replacement by agroecosystems.
The orchard is suggestive of the ways in which commercial apple growing was represented as an idealised lifestyle linking rural economy and nature…
The authors propose and discuss four ‘intersections’ that have potential as loci of interdisciplinary engagement: mutual understanding; spatial scale and locale; time and change; and the environment and agency.
This article looks at continuities and change around the issue of agricultural sustainability in colonial and post-colonial Kabale.
The general view in Swedish historiography of an inherent conflict between iron-making and the practice of slash-and-burn is questioned on the basis of this palaeoecological case study of repeated slash-and-burn cultivation from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in a mining district of central Sweden.
This paper analyses the arguments in favour of recycling put forth by agricultural chemists in the mid-nineteenth century.
