Introductory description

Early modern and modern empires reshaped nature through extracting, planting, and building on previously unprecedented scales. In turn, changing concepts of nature and diverse experiences of particular environments moulded empires. Starting from a selection of written and visual primary source material, each seminar on this course examines a distinct environment, exploring how various empires (including non-European ones) changed and were changed by these surroundings.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

AUTUMN TERM

Block 1: Introductory

1. No seminar

2. Empires and environments: an overview

• William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
• Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016)

1. Thinking like an environmental historian

• Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, ‘The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-Reading of the Field’, Environmental History, 12, 1 (2007), pp. 107-30
• J. R. McNeill, ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’, History and Theory, 42, 4 (2003), pp. 5–43
• Gabriella Corona, conversation with Piero Bevilacqua, Guillermo Castro, Ranjan Chakrabarti, Kobus du Pisani, J.R. McNeill, Donald Worster, “What is Global Environmental History?” Global Environment, 2 (2009): 228–249

Block 2: Imperial environments

1. Plantations

• Richard Grove, Green imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
• Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A history of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet (London: Verso, 2018)
• John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (University of California Press, 2006)

1. Coasts

• Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019)
• Tamara Fernando, ‘Seeing like the sea: A multispecies history of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery’, Past & Present, 254 (2022), pp. 127–160
• Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

1. Reading week

2. Deserts

• Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2016)
• Jennifer Keating, On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)
• Meredith McKittrick, ‘Theories of “Reprecipitation” and Climate Change in the Settler Colonial World’, History of Meteorology, 8 (2017), pp. 74-94

1. Mountains

• James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
• Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz, The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)
• Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005)

Block 3: Nonhuman life

1. Microbes and insects

• Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820-1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
• Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
• David A. Bello, ‘To Go Where No Han Could Go For Long: Malaria and the Qing Construction of Ethnic Administrative Space in Frontier Yunnan’, Modern China, Vol. 31, No. 3 (July, 2005), pp.283-317

1. Megafauna

• Jonathan Saha, Colonizing Animals (2022)
• Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)
• Alan Mikhail, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)

SPRING TERM

1. Plants

• Stefanie Gänger, A Singular Remedy: Cinchona across the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• S. Ravi Rajan, Modernizing nature. Forestry and imperial eco-development 1800-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Gregory Barton, ‘Empire forestry and the origins of environmentalism’, Journal of Historical Geography, 27, 4 (2001), pp. 529–52

1. Assessment skills: environmental history for an interdisciplinary audience

• Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Humanities and Social Sciences: Human Stories and the Anthropocene Earth System’, in Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right, ed. Julia Adeney Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) pp. 51-80
• Lukas M. Verburgt and Elske de Waal, ‘Introduction: Rethinking History of Science in the Anthropocene’, Isis, 113, 2 (2022), pp. 366–76
• Libby Robin, ‘Environmental humanities and climate change: understanding humans geologically and other life forms ethically’, WIREs Climate Change (2017), pp. 1-18

Block 4: Imperial interventions

1. Canals and dams

• Philipp Lehmann, Desert Edens: Colonial Climate Engineering in the Age of Anxiety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022)
• Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

1. Fuels and energy

• Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy
• Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘The oils of empire’, in H.A. Curry, N. Jardine, J.A. Secord, and E.C. Spary (eds.), Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.379-98
• Nathan Kapoor, ‘Energy and Empire’, in The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire, ed. Andrew Goss (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 97-106

1. Air and ocean

• Sunil Amrith, Unruly waters: How mountain rivers and monsoons have shaped South Asia’s history (London: Allen Lane, 2018)
• Michael S. Reidy and Helen M. Rozwadowski, ‘The Spaces In Between: Science, Ocean, Empire’, Isis, 105, 2 (Jun., 2014), pp. 338-51
• Martin Mahony and Georgina Endfield, ‘Climate and colonialism’, WIREs Climate Change, 9 (2018), pp. 1-16

1. Reading week

Block 5: Knowing natures

1. Maritime and land empires

• Ruth Rogaski, Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
• David Moon, The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)

1. Global visions

• Deborah R. Coen, Climate in motion: Science, empire, and the problem of scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)
• Richard Grove and George Adamson, El Niño in World History (London: Palgrave, 2018)
• Gregory T. Cushman, ‘Humboldtian Science, Creole Meteorology, and the Discovery of Human-Caused Climate Change in South America’, Osiris, 26, 1 (2011), pp. 19-44

1. Fears and environmentalisms

• Fabian Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity’, Critical Inquiry, 38, 3 (2012), pp. 579-598
• Meredith McKittrick, ‘Talking about the Weather: Settler Vernaculars, and Climate Anxieties in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa’, Environmental History 23 (2018), pp. 3-27
• Mike Davis, ‘The Coming Desert: Kropotkin, Mars and the Pulse of Asia’, New Left Review 97 (2016), pp. 23-43

1. Presentations to an interdisciplinary audience

SUMMER TERM

Block 6: Summing up

1. The Empireocene?

• Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, ‘On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene’ (2017)
• Rohan D’Souza, ‘Environmentalism and the Politics of Pre-emption: reconsidering South Asia’s environmental history in the epoch of the Anthropocene’, Geoforum, 101 (2019), pp.242-9
• Iva Peša, ‘A Planetary Anthropocene? Views From Africa’, Isis, 113, 2 (2022), pp. 386–95

1. Doing history in a crisis

• Katie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor & Ruth Morgan, ‘Doing environmental history in urgent times’, History Australia, 17, 2 (2020), pp. 230–251
• Mark Carey, ‘Science, Models, and Historians: Toward a Critical Climate History’, Environmental History, 19, 2 (2014), pp. 354-64
• Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Critically engage with, and appropriately deploy, theories and methods of environmental history.
• Understand the historical co-constitution of empires and environments on large spatial and temporal scales.
• Relate micro, local, and regional case studies to macro, continental, and global scales of analysis.
• Gain expertise in relating historical analysis to audiences trained in a range of scientific and social scientific disciplines, and in turn learning and incorporating insights from these disciplines.
• Identify how past human-environment interactions and past forms of environmental knowledge can inform and enrich understandings of present-day environmental concerns and priorities.

Research element

See assessment components

Interdisciplinary

Highly interdisciplinary, drawing on primary material from across sciences and arts, and secondary material from a range of disciplines beyond history narrowly defined, including: anthropology, environmental humanities, history of science, geography, critical theory, science and technology studies, and Earth System science.

International

Truly global in scope, including oceans and land masses, every continent and polar regions. Furthermore, the course is planetary in the sense of focusing on atmospheric, earthy, and oceanic volumes.

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes

Transferable skills

Presenting and writing to interdisciplinary audiences; focus on relating historical material to present-day concerns and perspectives; group presentation within seminars require coordinated teamwork; analytical skills and knowledge base appropriate to a second-year undergraduate course; clear and effective verbal and written communication skills.