Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World

About this book

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 – transformations 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 a sudden bout of ecological devastation, 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, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire provides a historical perspective on the vital nexus of social, political, and environmental issues that we face in the twenty-first-century world.

Contents

Introduction: Ecology, Power, and Imperialism

PART I: A World of Goods: The Ecology of Colonial Extraction
1: The Ecology of Cotton: Environment, Labour, and Empire
2: Bittersweet Harvest: The Colonial Cocoa Boom and the Tropical Forest Frontier
3: Colonialism, Rubber, and the Rainforest
4: Subterranean Frontier: Tin Mining, Empire, and Environment in Southeast Asia
5: Peripheral Centres: Copper Mining and Colonized Environments in Central Africa
6: Oil, Empire, and Environment

PART II: Conservation, Improvement, and Environmental Management in the Colonies
7: Tropical Nature in Trust: The Politics of Colonial Conservation
8: Forests, Ecology, and Power in the Tropical Colonies
9: Cultivating the Colonies: Agriculture, Development, and Environment

PART III: Acceleration, Decline, and Aftermath
10: Progress and Hubris: The Political Ecology of Late Colonial Development
11: Beyond Colonialism: Tropical Environments and the Legacies of Empire

Conclusion

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Biography

Corey Ross is Professor of Modern History at the University of Birmingham and the author of several books on the history of mass media and popular culture, heritage and ancestral pasts, and everyday life under state socialism, with a particular focus on Germany. Since arriving at Birmingham in 1998, he has held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin, a J. Walter Thompson Fellowship at Duke University, and a guest professorship at the Université Paris-II. His primary research interests are in global environmental history, modern imperialism, and modern European social and cultural history.