Recent Themes in the Environmental History of the British Empire

Abstract

Accessing and controlling environments underpinned British imperialism. Imperialism gave Britain control over millions of hectares of cropland and access to countless other resources. In the search for efficient ways of using natural resources, British imperialism shifted flora, fauna and commodities around the world. Ecological disruption and radical environmental changes never before experienced in history resulted. Imperialism also contributed to the production of many modern attitudes and disciplines through which we now understand nature. Given the fundamental importance of the use and role of natural resources in British imperialism, this article presents an overview of its environmental historiography, examining issues of agency, scale and exchange.

Histories of Technology and the Environment in Post/Colonial Africa: Reflections on the Field

“…As a matter of fact, many historians have utilized oral histories interviews with contemporaries or memory keepers in a creative way in order to supplement, or compensate for a lack of, written records [58][59][60][61]. In addition, social histories have often drawn on court records to explore social conflicts and tensions between social groups 9 . History of technology and the environment offers another set of nonwritten sources for interpretation-artefacts, buildings, infrastructures, landscapes, etc.…”

“…Not only Africans' technological practices and perceptions, but also their interrelations with nature and the environment have so far been primarily regarded through an "imperial" lens. Most environmental histories focusing on the colonial period are concerned with the activities of the European colonizers, on resource extraction, cash crops, and plantations, as well as on tensions between the exploitation and subjugation of nature (e.g., dam building, irrigation, hunting) and colonial conservation efforts [9,29,30,33,[237][238][239][240][241]. In these narratives, the activities and agencies of local people often take a backseat.…”

“…Numerous studies have investigated such "enviro-tech" relations in and for Europe and North America [5][6][7][8] 3 . With regard to post/colonial Africa, however, history of technology and environmental history were (and are) rarely written as joined projects despite their overlapping interests (with notable exceptions in the literature on urban sanitation or the construction of large multi-purpose dams) [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. There is still much to be learned, though, on how (colonial, but also indigenous) technologies and practices influenced and shaped natural and social environments-and vice versa, from (inadvertent) enviro-technical feedback loops (e.g., the spread of non-indigenous species along extended networks of transport) and eco-cultural commodity frontiers to the workings of what might be called the "colonial metabolism".…”

Trends and potential expansions in the environmental histories of British Malaya

“…Since its emergence in the 1970s, environmental history has interacted with various subfields to create a thriving area of inquiry—one regularly incorporating new geographical regions, time periods, and themes. Amidst all these, however, histories of the British Empire have been particularly receptive to incorporating the study of relationships between humans and nature (Beattie, ), resulting in an environmental historiography that is ever‐expanding to include new intellectual ideas. Examining works on regions such as British India, for instance, we see a diversity of investigations that range from hydrology (Agnihotri, ; Mosse & Sivan, ) and hunting (Sramek, ), to forestry (Rao, ; Thaha, ) and pollution (Anderson, ).…”

Medicine in the field: Growing connections between environmental and medical history

“…These latter are increasingly histories of partial adoption, adaptation, and the reclaiming of non‐Western knowledge systems as significant and global, impacting in more nuanced flows of encounter and intersection. Consequently both historians of medicine and of the environment have had to shift their focus, alter their citation practices, and considerably complicate centre‐periphery models (Beattie, 2012; Haila, 1997; Saikku, 2019).…”