Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

by Niels Brimnes (Editor), Karen Oslund (Editor), Christina Folke Ax (Editor), Niklas Thode Jensen (Editor)

Overview

The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature revealsthe nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exoticnature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally "got their hands dirty" in the business of empire.

The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India. They are global in scope, ranging from the Russian North to Mozambique, examining the consequences of colonialismon nature, including its impact on animals, fisheries, farmlands, medical practices, and even the diets of indigenouspeople.

Cultivating the Colonies establishes beyond all possible doubt the importance of the environment as a locus for studyingthe power of the colonial state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780896802827
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	06/22/2011
Series:	Ohio RIS Global Series , #12
Edition description:	1
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Christina Folke Ax is at the University of Iceland on a postdoctoral project. She has published articles in the Scandinavian Journal of History and in Nordic Perspectives on Encountering Foreignness.

Niels Brimnes is an associate professor of history at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is the author of Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India.

Niklas Thode Jensen is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His forthcoming book is titled For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and Power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848.

Karen Oslund is an assistant professor of world history at Towson University in Maryland. Her publications include Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlanticand a coedited volume with David L. Hoyt, The Study of Language and the Politics of Community in Global Context,1740-1940.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Getting Our Hands Dirty Karen Oslund 1

Part 1 Perceiving the Colonial Environment 17

Chapter 1 The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments: Advice on Health and Prosperity Andrew Wear 19

Chapter 2 Carved Out of Nature: Identity and Environment in German Colonial Africa Daniel Rouven Steinbach 47

Chapter 3 The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the Spanish and American Philippines Greg Bankoff 78

Chapter 4 Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 David Biggs 109

Part 2 Managing the Colonial Environment 133

Chapter 5 Wetland Colonies: Louisiana, Guangzhou, Pondicherry, and Senegal Christopher Morris 135

Chapter 6 Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier Julia Lajus 164

Chapter 7 Recasting Disease and Its Environment: Indigenous Medical Practitioners, the Plague, and Politics in Colonial India, 1898-1910 Kavita Sivaramakrishnan 191

Chapter 8 Changing Times, Changing Palates: The Dietary Impacts of Basuto Adaptation to New Rulers, Crops, and Markets, 1830s-1966 Phia Steyn 214

Part 3 The Legacy of Colonialism 237

Chapter 9 State Rationality, Development, and the Making of State Territory: From Colonial Extraction to Postcolonial Conservation in Southern Mozambique Elizabeth Lunstrum 239

Chapter 10 Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute Peder Anker 275

Chapter 11 Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines, and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism Joseph M. Hodge 300

List of Contributors 327

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

"Cultivating the Colonies embarks on an ambitious task, investigating the nuts and bolts of colonial environmental governance and understanding how that study can illuminate the modern complexities in post-independence states. The editors and authors have done well not to shy away from the complexity of their task. Rather than attempting to address every nuance of colonial history, Cultivating the Colonies provides well defined case studies that will serve as examples for future study and investigation of colonial management of nature and people."--Middle Ground Journal

"A coherent and excellent volume on the environmental history of the arable and non-arable colonial world...this book is a valuable and important addition to global and comparative world environmental history."--European History Quarterly

"Scholars of environmental history would benefit from reading this lucidly written book, especially because it discusses diverse cases and has useful references to vernacular sources."--Technology and Culture

From the Publisher