The Environment and World History

About this book

Since around 1500 C.E., humans have shaped the global environment in ways that were previously unimaginable. Bringing together leading environmental historians and world historians, this book offers an overview of global environmental history throughout this remarkable 500-year period.

In eleven essays, the contributors examine the connections between environmental change and other major topics of early modern and modern world history: population growth, commercialization, imperialism, industrialization, the fossil fuel revolution, and more.Rather than attributing environmental change largely to European science, technology, and capitalism, the essays illuminate a series of culturally distinctive, yet often parallel developments arising in many parts of the world, leading to intensified exploitation of land and water.

The wide range of regional studies - including some in Russia, China, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Southern Africa, and Western Europe - together with the book's broader thematic essays makes "The Environment and World History" ideal for courses that seek to incorporate the environment and environmental change more fully into a truly integrative understanding of world history.

Contents

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One: Overview
1. Introduction: World History and Environmental History
2. The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment
3. Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land

Part Two: Rivers, Regions, and Developmentalism
4. The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E.-2 C.E.
5. The Transformation of China's Environment, 1500-2
6. The Rhine as a World River
7. Continuity and Transformation: Colonial Rice Frontiers and Their Environmental Impact on the Great River Deltas of Mainland Southeast Asia

Part Three: Landscapes, Conquests, Communities, and the Politics of Knowledge
8. Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective
9. Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Landscapes, and Ecologies
10. Latin American Environmental History: A Shifting Old/New Field
11. The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History

Select Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Edmund Burke III is Professor, Presidental Chair, and Director of the Center for World History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and coeditor, with David N. Yaghoubian, of "Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East" (second editon, UC Press).

Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of "The Great Divergence", among other books.