“War and Natural Resources in History: Introduction”
This paper examines how natural resources have been an important motive, target, and resource for warfare throughout human history.
This paper examines how natural resources have been an important motive, target, and resource for warfare throughout human history.
Four centuries of colonial extraction lead to severe ecological degradation of the forests and soils of the Atlantic region of Brazil. This article discusses the management of soil fertility and the relationship between agricultural practices and forest stands based on agricultural manuals published in Brazil over a period of more than two centuries.
Recent research on Africa has emphasised conservation and trypanosomiasis control as the major factors, which first motivated colonial officials and scientists to embark on forestry preservation and bush clearing policies. This paper contends that in Chepalungu, Kenya, forestry preservation and bush clearing were implemented with the objective to create a racially and tribally segregated landscape.
This paper explores imperial forestry networks by focusing on a single individual, Sir David Hutchins, who spent the final years of his life in New Zealand extolling the need for scientific forest management in the Dominion.
Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this paper questions the usefulness of regional data for understanding food insecurity, and shows that the supposedly novel ideas of the present in fact have a strong colonial lineage.
Looking at the pastoral Toda people of the Wenlock Downs, this paper considers grassland transformations in the Nilgiris, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
The contributions in this volume of RCC Perspectives address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have been represented aesthetically and exploited politically in very different contexts.
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What does history tell us about energy transitions? What do energy transitions tell us about the history of colonialism? This volume of RCC Perspectives presents five histories of colonial projects that transformed potential energy sources in Africa, Europe, North America, and Greenland into mechanical energy for wealth production.
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