This article’s objective is to present, via bibliographic research, the territorial makeup of colonial Brazil (1500-1822) and the Brazilian historical approach at the beginning of the twentieth century that sought to relate questions and concepts of frontier, territoriality, and nature in the historic role of the bandeirante movement. The goal here is to address territorial and geographic questions, but also environmental ones, based on historical geography, and to present arguments that fall in the nexus between history and nature in the debate on Brazilian territorial expansion. The text is grounded in classical works, and works by renown authors on this topic, but we also include discussion of less well known sources. The intent is to identify how the theme of bandeirantes and Brazilian westward expansion can be analyzed differently in the pertinent specialized historical literature.

The traditional focus of agricultural history has been the study of rural landscapes, societies, and economies, as well as agricultural production and technologies. In contrast, environmental history has adopted a more interdisciplinary research approach, offering both ecological and political analyses, and addressing the world's current environmental crises from a historical perspective. Drawing on the environmental perspective, this article explores the development of human food production. Subsistence has been an important part of history from the earliest times to the advent of modern, industrial agriculture. The seasonal migrations of gathering and hunting peoples were based on their procurement of food. Although the emergence of farming and herding led to the rise of urban, elite classes specializing in other activities, food production remained the focus of the vast majority of people in agrarian empires. This article investigates the transitions between three basic modes of production: what I. G. Simmons has called the distinct "cultural ecologies" of gatherer-hunter, agrarian, and industrial societies.

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This article seeks to address the connections between the development of dams and irrigation systems in the state of Sonora in northwest Mexico with agricultural modernisation in the mid to late twentieth century. It evaluates agricultural, environmental and social results of this water development through the lens of political ecology. It argues that in Mexico a 'hydraulic bureaucracy' emanating from the national capital Mexico City governed water policy and development in Sonora, with environmental and social impacts that were not foreseen.

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The Provincias Unidas del Centro de América (later called the Federación de la América Central) lasted from 1824 to 1838. Despite the various reasons for the union's disintegration in 1838, the dream of reunification has resurfaced at least twenty-five times. Geography, three hundred years of colonial union, and what Thomas Karnes has termed “more bonds of similarity than any other small group of nations” have all made the region of Central America an obvious candidate for unification.

The field of environmental history in the past twenty years has become an important discipline for every continent on earth. Yet this internationalization has taken a more recent transnational turn, which this essay addresses. Now various scholars are asking questions about ecological connections between countries, about ecosystems that cross international borders, and about the environmental impact of transnational industries, export agriculture, international trade, and immigration. The works under review here address these themes, and the current essay frames the books in the contexts of both environmental history and transnational history, offering an analysis of how they are advancing the conjoined fields.

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