The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion

by David Arnold

This book considers how nature - in both its biological and environmental manifestations - has been invoked as a dynamic force in human history. It shows how historians, philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and scientists have used ideas of nature to explain the evolution of cultures, to understand cultural difference, and to justify or condemn colonization, slavery and racial superiority. It examines the central part that ideas of environmental and biological determinism have played in theory, and describes how these ideas have served in different ways at different times as instruments of authority, identity and defiance. The book shows how powerful and problematic the invocation of nature can be.

Genres: Environment, History

207 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1996

About the author

David Arnold is professor emeritus of Asian and global history in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Among his numerous works are Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India; Gandhi; and The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856.

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best part of this book for me was the discussion of tropicality, and the way that wonder at nature was interwoven with a fear of it as contaminating or otherwise dangerous. It’s interesting that these attitudes exhibited a shift between the 18th and 19th-20th centuries. Also interesting was the discussion of the frontier juxtaposed with a discussion of the difference that indigenous peoples made to Latin American vs. North American history in terms of the perception of the frontier. In North America, Indian removal preceded colonization and contributed to the perception of the West as empty and primordial. In Latin America, Spanish colonialism relied on a spatially dispersed colonial hierarchy that kept many indigenous peoples in place (and left alone some that were the hardest to reach), meaning that the primordialist vision of the frontier (a la Frederick Jackson Turner) never really took hold there.

[Frances]

I read Chapter 8: Inventing Topicality