Environment and Empire

Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series

by William Beinart, Lotte Hughes

European imperialism was extraordinarily far-reaching: a key global historical process of the last 500 years. It locked disparate human societies together over a wider area than any previous imperial expansion; it underpinned the repopulation of the Americas and Australasia; it was the precursor of globalization as we now understand it. Imperialism was inseparable from the history of global environmental change. Metropolitan countries sought raw materials of all kinds, from timber and furs to rubber and oil. They established sugar plantations that transformed island ecologies. Settlers introduced new methods of farming and displaced indigenous peoples. Colonial cities, many of which became great conurbations, fundamentally changed relationships between people and nature. Consumer cultures, the internal combustion engine, and pollution are now ubiquitous.

Environmental history deals with the reciprocal interaction between people and other elements in the natural world, and this book illustrates the diverse environmental themes in the history of empire. Initially concentrating on the material factors that shaped empire and environmental change, Environment and Empire discusses the way in which British consumers and manufacturers sucked in resources that were gathered, hunted, fished, mined, and farmed. Yet it is also clear that British settler and colonial states sought to regulate the use of natural resources as well as commodify them. Conservation aimed to preserve resources by exclusion, as in wildlife parks and forests, and to guarantee efficient use of soil and water. Exploring these linked themes of exploitation and conservation, this study concludes with a focus on political reassertions by colonised peoples over natural resources. In a post-imperial age, they have found a new voice, reformulating ideas about nature, landscape,
and heritage and challenging, at a local and global level, views of who has the right to regulate nature.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

395 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2007

Reviews

[mantareads · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

The chapters themselves are concise and readable. As an introduction into the intersections between the titular themes of "environment" and "empire", this is as good a starting point as any other. Beinart and Hughes' ambition to give some scope to how imperial impulses, ideas and policies developed in relation to the environment is laudable, although there are sections in the book which grate a little for this reader of Southeast Asian history.

In particular, I take issue with the authors' recurrent use of "Malaysia" to describe the colonies of British Malaya. While "Malaysia" as a label was occasionally used in pre-1963 documents, it was certainly not the name that British administrators used in their correspondences, letterheads or documents to refer to this particular geographical space. "Malaysia" as a polity and as a name only comes into widespread usage with the Federation of Malaya's merger with Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak in 1963. "Malaysia" and "Malaya" are not synonyms, and should certainly not be in a work on imperial history. Beinart and Hughes do not really explain their choice of the word "Malaysia" either, nor the awareness that this word has a different set of connotations and inflections vs "Malaya". The lack of precision in nomenclature is rather regrettable, given that an entire chapter in the book is dedicated "Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia [sic]".

[Yeast · Rating 3 out of 5]

As mentioned in the introduction, Environment and Empire is a quick walk-through of some selective topics concerning the environmental history of British Empire. It serves as a decent introduction for people interested in the various economic, social, political themes interwoven into the land (yes, the discussion of "environment" is largely terrestrial based) of the colonies and the people and societies they were part of.

Overall, this is a informative book. The structure may be improved by providing general themes to encompass similar topics and by providing brief introduction for each theme (e.g. urban environment and health, resources exploitation, imperial science and management). An additional "conclusion" chapter to summarize all its nineteen chapters should be helpful for readers to better appreciate the common themes and future perspective of the historical research on the environment of the Empire.

[aster ❦]

read chap 11 for environmental policy. interesting to read about a disease and insect ive never heard of before

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, swift overview that covers a wide range of countries. Mostly Anglo-centric about the contexts it details, so smaller colonial Dutch and French attempts at empire building via natural resource based expansion don't get much coverage vs the UK.