Browse

A new class of “merchant clerks” appeared on the historical stage in the middle of the nineteenth century, collectively charged with administering the most important production project in America’s emerging capitalist economy, production of the market. In so doing, they manned a labor-intensive regime of writing operations and accounting procedures that transposed a general miscellany of goods into standard sets of commensurable values, re-inventing trade as a far more universal and abstract grid of relations than anything previously known in the marketplaces and seasonal fairs of older systems of exchange. At the same time, these ambitious young men were no less devoted to producing a new version of selfhood as well, one that matched the mobility and mutability so essential to the commodity form. Crossing the thresholds that divided farm and metropolis, homestead and boarding house, and, most significantly, growing things and selling them, they redefined the relationship between “Mammon and Manhood,” and personified that most evocative of modern keywords, human capital.

The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a rapidly industrializing North. However, this book argues that the Republican Party’s political ideology was fundamentally agrarian. Believing that small farms owned by families for generations led to a model society, Republicans supported a northern agricultural ideal in opposition to southern plantation agriculture, which destroyed the land’s productivity, required constant western expansion, and produced an elite landed gentry hostile to the Union. The book shows how agrarian republicanism shaped the debate over slavery’s expansion, spurred the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Homestead Act, and laid the foundation for the development of the earliest nature parks.

This transnational history explores how postwar fishing changed from a coastal, in-shore activity into a global industry. Fueled by the new technologies developed during the war and by government subsidies, nations went fishing on an industrial scale. As Cold War policies hardened, fishing became a territorial claim in the oceans, and many nations, including Japan, the Soviets, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and a host of Eastern European states industrialized their fisheries. Governments provided subsidies to modernize moving fishing from salting to freezing and the creation of new fish forms. Post-war trade agreements linked Icelandic cod and Japanese tuna; as imports of both increased, fishermen in New England and Southern California were priced out of their domestic markets. The massive explosion in fishing power created pressure for nations to expand their territorial limits in the 1970s, to regulate foreign fishing in their waters. The expansion of fisheries in the Pacific during the Cold War stimulated the globalization of fishing and the creation of international fisheries management. While most histories of fishing deal with the primacy of the Atlantic, this book looks at the post-war movement of boats from the Pacific into the Atlantic.

This book provides a detailed account of Israeli forests, tracing their history from the Bible to the present, and outlines the effort to transform drylands and degraded soils into prosperous parks, rangelands, and ecosystems. The book's description of Israel's trials and errors, and its exploration of both the environmental history and the current policy dilemmas surrounding that country'ss forests, hope to provide valuable lessons in the years to come for other parts of the world seeking to reestablish timberlands.

Species acclimatization--the organized introduction of organisms to a new region--is much maligned in the present day. However, colonization depended on moving people, plants, and animals from place to place, and in centuries past, scientists, landowners, and philanthropists formed acclimatization societies to study local species and conditions, form networks of supporters, and exchange supposedly useful local and exotic organisms across the globe. Pete Minard tells the story of this movement, arguing that the colonies, not the imperial centers, led the movement for species acclimatization. Far from attempting to re-create London or Paris, settlers sought to combine plants and animals to correct earlier environmental damage and to populate forests, farms, and streams to make them healthier and more productive. By focusing particularly on the Australian colony of Victoria, Minard reveals a global network of would-be acclimatizers, from Britain and France to Russia and the United States. Although the movement was short-lived, the long reach of nineteenth-century acclimatization societies continues to be felt today, from choked waterways to the uncontrollable expansion of European pests in former colonies.

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.

Bankers and Empire reconstructs the history of the expansion of Wall Street’s banking houses and financial institutions (including the precursors to Citigroup and JPMorganChase) into the Caribbean region (including Haiti, Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico) during a period stretching from the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression. The period represents an initial, exploratory era of the internationalization of US banking, and the Caribbean region was Wall Street’s laboratory for foreign expansion. As such, the period was marked by experimentation in the organizational and managerial apparatus of foreign banking, challenges to the legal orders governing the regulation of international trade and finance, and the development and training of a first cohort of international managers and bank officers. In addition, Bankers and Empire demonstrates that this history was as much one of race and culture as it was of economics and money: the putatively financial concerns of Wall Street were embedded in and understood through racist discourses and ideas of racial difference. The book argues that the history of US imperialism, Wall Street’s internationalization, and the development of finance capitalism was braided through the history of racial capitalism. Finally, while the early twentieth century history of Wall Street’s internationalization rode a euphoric wave of US nationalism and expansionism, in reality it was a period marked by its repeated failures. Corruption, military interventions and occupations, financial and economic crises, and Caribbean resistance to imperialism put a brake on Wall Street’s ambitions.

This book asks an age-old question about the relationship between human consciousness and the environment: How do we think about our own thoughts and actions? How can we transcend the exigencies of daily life? How can we achieve sufficient distance from our own everyday realities to think and act more sustainably? To address these questions, the book draws on the results of decades of research in South and Southeast Asia on how local cultures have circumvented the “curse of consciousness” — the paradox that we cannot completely comprehend the ecosystem of which we are part. The book is focussed on three principles: perspectivism (seeing oneself from outside oneself), metamorphosis (becoming something that one is not), and mimesis (copying something that one is not), which help a society to transcend the hubris and myopia of everyday existence and achieve greater insight into its ecosystem.

Blood and Water is a history of the political and environmental transformation of the Indus basin as a result of the modern construction in the region of the world’s largest integrated irrigation system. The system was begununder British colonial rule in the nineteenth century, and the resulting transformation continued after the region was divided between two new states, India and Pakistan, in 1947. It was a process deeply shaped, from the beginning, by colonial statecraft-and by the fissures within colonial policies and ideologies. The book traces the critical intersection between competing visions of community that shaped the environmental transformation. On the one hand, forms of political mobilization and productive incentives were developed to facilitate the extension of coordinated, productive control of the region’s environment. At the same time, the state mobilized countervailing visions of community based on genealogy and blood to stabilize its political authority. The tensions between these competing visions were deeply embedded in the politics of irrigation development, and they have continued to frame the ways that irrigators have been mobilized within the system.

This book sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this book shows how the control of resources—especially water—in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. The book examines the ways in which environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras—a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.

In the nineteenth century, the colonial territories of California and Hawaiʻi underwent important cultural, economic, and ecological transformations influenced by an unlikely factor: cows. The creation of native cattle cultures, represented by the Indian vaquero and the Hawaiian paniolo, demonstrates that California Indians and native Hawaiians adapted in ways that allowed them to harvest the opportunities for wealth that these unfamiliar biological resources presented. But the imposition of new property laws limited these indigenous responses, and Pacific cattle frontiers ultimately became the driving force behind Euro-American political and commercial domination, under which native residents lost land and sovereignty and faced demographic collapse. Environmental historians have too often overlooked California and Hawaiʻi, despite the roles the regions played in the colonial ranching frontiers of the Pacific World. Cattle Colonialism significantly enlarges the scope of the American West by examining the trans-Pacific transformations these animals wrought on local landscapes and native economies.

The natural beauty of Austin, Texas, has always been central to the city’s identity. From the beginning, city leaders, residents, planners, and employers consistently imagined Austin as a natural place, highlighting the region’s environmental attributes as they marketed the city and planned for its growth. Yet, as Austin modernized and attracted an educated and skilled labor force, the demand to preserve its natural spaces was used to justify economic and racial segregation. This effort to create and maintain a “city in a garden” perpetuated uneven social and economic power relationships throughout the twentieth century. In telling Austin’s story, Andrew M. Busch invites readers to consider the wider implications of environmentally friendly urban development. While Austin’s mainstream environmental record is impressive, its minority groups continue to live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the city. By demonstrating how the city’s midcentury modernization and progressive movement sustained racial oppression, restriction, and uneven development in the decades that followed, Busch reveals the darker ramifications of Austin’s green growth.

East Germany, its economy, and its society were in decline long before the country's political collapse in the late 1980s. This book argues that the clues were there in the natural landscape, but policy analysts were blind to them. Had they noted the record of the leadership's values and goals manifest in the landscape, they would not have hailed East Germany as a Marxist-Leninist success story. The book sets East German history within the context of the landscape history of two centuries to underscore how forest and ecosystem change offered a reliable barometer to the health and stability of the political system that governed them. It explains how East German leaders' indifference to human rights and their disregard for the landscape affected the rural economy, forests, and population. This lesson from history suggests new ways of thinking about the health of ecosystems and landscapes, and proposes assessing the stability of modern political systems based on the environment's system qualities rather than on political leaders' goals and beliefs.

The interconnected lives of humans and elephants have shaped landscapes, determined the destinies of empires, and stimulated new kinds of knowledge, skill, and practice. Their encounters have also produced intimate forms of companionship, as well as conflict over space and resources. In South Asia, where many people live in close proximity to elephants, this interspecies relationship resonates with cultural significance. Such diverse, multifaceted, and frequently problematic relations between two kinds of intelligent social mammals have drawn the attention of multiple types of researchers and research. Interpreting this interspecies encounter, however, remains problematic, often producing disparate understandings that resist coherent integration. This volume seeks to remedy the problem of disciplinary commensurability by facilitating conversation across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Bringing together anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and Sanskrit language specialists, this volume explores the social, historical, and ecological dimensions of human–elephant conflict and coexistence. It engages with both species as world-making subjects acting in ways that profoundly affect each other. This book not only helps us appreciate that we cannot understand elephant habitat and behaviour in isolation from the humans that help configure it, but also makes us realize that we cannot understand human political, economic, and social life without the elephants that shape and share the world with them. Refusing to study animal ecologies and human histories as exclusive phenomena, this book argues for an integrated approach to understanding and responding to the challenges of human–elephant relations.

Examines rising alarm over waste of natural resources, and its use by Theodore Roosevelt and his administration to further objectives of conservation and an American form of empire. These objectives encompassed both preservationist and utilitarian approaches, centered on efficiency, but interpreting efficiency in social and political rather than economic terms. These policies revealed an emerging idea of environmental “habitability” that presaged modern interest in sustainability. The suite of policies closely tracked a developing geopolitical worldview, c. 1898-1910. Anxieties over resource shortage were stimulated by acquisition of a formal colonial empire, and the concurrent emergence of the United States as a world power. Connects this awareness to international fears over European powers’ impact upon the non-western world, and concerns over international competition for resource dominance. Documents work by Gifford Pinchot and other government officials, politicians and conservation minded-reformers to curb and/or rationalize resource use. Deals with forests, waterways and irrigation, fossil fuels, soils and rural problems, national parks and other “preservationist” initiatives, and public health. Shows the relationship between this conservationist agenda and similar concerns in other countries. Advances the idea of settler colonialism within an Anglo-Saxon racial hegemony as foundational to Roosevelt’s response to the perceived crisis. Examines contradictions within Progressive conservation over intergenerational equity and over the international outlook that conservationists advocated. Traces the post-1910 attenuation of the conservationist agenda resulting from internal politics conflicts, economic demands within a consumer oriented market system, and external events, especially World War I.

'Earth Emotions' is an invitation to the reader to participate in the emergent global drama between the emotionally charged forces of creation and destruction. Both sets of emotions are needed for the survival and the flourishing of the species, however, we live in an epoch where the forces of destruction are overwhelming positive or creative emotions. The name for this period of human dominance is the 'Anthropocene'. The book promotes an antidote to the Anthropocene in the form of the 'Symbiocene', a future era where positive earth emotions will flourish. Through these two master concepts, both types of emotions are systematically examined in the context of nature and life. Starting with a recently defined negative earth emotion, 'solastalgia', the reader is taken on a psycho-terratic (psyche-earth) journey through all of the earth emotions and feelings in use in the public and academic literature. The book culminates in the affirmation of positive emotional relationships to the Earth for current and future generations. As a relentlessly optimistic manifesto for living in the future, this book addresses the emotional, cultural, ethical, political, spiritual and practical aspects of positive earth emotions and the defeat of those that are destructive of people and the planet.

This book investigates the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? The author recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. Thus, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

The age of European high imperialism was characterized by the movement of plants and animals on a historically unprecedented scale. The human migrants who colonized territories around the world brought a variety of other species with them, from the crops and livestock they hoped to propagate, to the parasites, invasive plants, and pests they carried unawares, producing a host of unintended consequences that reshaped landscapes around the world. While the majority of histories about the dynamics of these transfers have concentrated on the British Empire, these nine case studies--focused on the Ottoman, French, Dutch, German, and British empires--seek to advance a historical analysis that is comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary to understand the causes, consequences, and networks of biological exchange and ecological change resulting from imperialism.

Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a coterie of fire ants came ashore from South American ships docked in Mobile, Alabama. Fanning out across the region, the fire ants invaded the South, damaging crops, harassing game animals, and hindering harvesting methods. Responding to a collective call from southerners to eliminate these invasive pests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed a campaign that not only failed to eradicate the fire ants but left a wake of dead wildlife, sickened cattle, and public protest. With political intrigue, environmental tragedy, and such figures as Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson, this book presents a perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices. Tracing the political and scientific eradication campaigns, this study uses the saga as a means to consider twentieth-century American concepts of nature and environmental stewardship. In telling the story, the book explores how human concepts of nature evolve and how these ideas affect the natural and social worlds.

Though Ireland is a relatively small island on the northeastern fringe of the Atlantic, 70 million people worldwide—including some 45 million in the United States—claim it as their ancestral home. This book explores the nineteenth-century roots of this transnational identity. Between 1840 and 1880, 4.5 million people left Ireland to start new lives abroad. Using primary sources from Ireland, Australia, and the United States, the book demonstrates how this exodus shaped a distinctive sense of nationalism. By doggedly remaining loyal to both their old and new homes, it argues, the Irish helped broaden the modern parameters of citizenship and identity.