Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire provides the first wide-ranging environmental history of the heyday of European imperialism, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the colonial era. It focuses on the ecological dimensions of the explosive growth of tropical commodity production, global trade, and modern resource management strategies that still visibly shape our world today, and how they were related to broader social, cultural, and political developments in Europe's colonies. Covering the overseas empires of all the major European powers, Corey Ross argues that tropical environments were not merely a stage on which conquest and subjugation took place, but were an essential part of the colonial project, profoundly shaping the imperial enterprise even as they were shaped by it. The story he tells is not only about the complexities of human experience, but also about people's relationship with the ecosystems in which they were themselves embedded: the soil, water, plants, and animals that were likewise a part of Europe's empire. Although it shows that imperial conquest rarely represented the signal ecological trauma that some accounts suggest, it nonetheless demonstrates that modern imperialism marked a decisive and largely negative milestone for the natural environment. By relating the expansion of modern empire, global trade, and mass consumption to the momentous ecological shifts that they entailed, this book provides a historical perspective on the vital nexus of social, political, and environmental issues that we face in the twenty-first-century world.

Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental—and therefore political—knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, the scientific treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book’s most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them.

In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.

What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.

Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany. But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving account of the abuses of indigenous Caribbean people and African slaves, Schiebinger describes how slave women brewed the "peacock flower" into an abortifacient, to ensure that they would bear no children into oppression. Yet, impeded by trade winds of prevailing opinion, knowledge of West Indian abortifacients never flowed into Europe. A rich history of discovery and loss, Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.

This volume uncovers the interaction between people and the elements in very different British colonies throughout the world. Providing a rich overview of socio-environmental change, driven by imperial forces, this study examines a key global historical process.

The Nile today plays a crucial role in the economics, politics and cultural life of ten countries and their more than 300 million inhabitants. No other international river basin has a longer, more complex and eventful history than the Nile. In telling the detailed story of the hydropolitics of the Nile valley in a period during which the conceptualisation, use and planning of the waters were revolutionised, and many of the most famous politicians of the twentieth century – Churchill, Mussolini, Eisenhower, Eden, Nasser and Haile Selassie – played active parts in the Nile game, this work will stand as a case study of a much more general and acute question: the political ecology of trans-national river basins.

A fascinating study of the important role of biology in European expansion, from 900 to 1900.

A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today. Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order. Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.