Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature

by Emmanuel Kreike

Overview

A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime

The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.

In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa.

Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691189017
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Series:	Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity , #30
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	538
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Emmanuel Kreike is professor of history at Princeton University. His books include Environmental Infrastructure in African History: Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management in Namibia and Re-Creating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Environcide, Society, and Total War 1

1 The Dogs of War and the Water Wolf in Holland: Environcide during the Late 16^th-Century Dutch Revolt 24

2 Scorched Earth, Black Legend: Environcide and the Early 16^th-Century Spanish Conquest of America 59

3 Environcide in the Dutch Golden Age: The Thirty Years War in Brabant, 1621-48 97

4 Raiders and Refugees: Environcide, Displacement, and Disease in 17^th-Century Eastern North America 137

5 (Un)Limited War and Environcide in the Age of Reason: The Low Countries, France, and Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-14 173

6 Total War and Environcide in the Age of Reason: The Low Countries, France, and Italy during the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740-48 201

7 A Global Way of War in the Age of Reason: Environcide and Genocide in 18^th-Century America, Africa, and Asia 243

8 Refugees, Removals, and Reservations: Environcide in the American West in the 19^th Century 279

9 Scorched Dutch East Indies: The Late 19^th-Century Colonial Conquest of Aceh, Indonesia 318

10 Scorched African Savannas: Colonial Conquest and the First World War in Early 20^th-Century Angola and Namibia 358

Conclusion: Environcide as a Crime against Humanity and Nature 394

Notes 419

Index 515

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Kreike's analysis is novel, compelling, and provocative. Scorched Earth is a significant and important book that offers a major reframing of conventional assumptions about the nature of war and even nature itself."—Mark Levene, author of The Crisis of Genocide

"The culmination of decades of painstaking work, this book is a crowning achievement. Scorched Earth provides new insights into dozens of campaigns in European and colonial warfare, and will shape debate for years to come."—J. R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914

"Scorched Earth is an impressive, thought-provoking, and richly detailed book. Kreike offers a new analytical lens through which to study the consequences of total war on both the environment and human societies."—Geoffrey B. Robinson, author of The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66

"Emmanuel Kreike has produced a sweeping synthesis of the history of war and environmental history grounded in a broad array of examples on both sides of the Atlantic. Scorched Earth illuminates the connections between environmental destruction, total war, and genocide that birthed the modern world and threaten still to destroy it."—Louis S. Warren, author of God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

"Wide-ranging and deeply researched, Scorched Earth traces the origins of genocidal colonial warfare in America, Africa, and Asia through a centuries-long European tradition of environmental destruction in pursuit of military victory."—Sam White, author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America

Editorial Reviews

"[A] powerful statement of what people often fail to see amid the horrors of war."

Choice Reviews

"Waging war against the Earth is an old business, and this book provides ample—and dispiriting—evidence for it."

Kirkus Reviews

"[A] sweeping history. . . . Kreike offers a stark corrective and an implicit warning: Humanity is not distinct from nature, and assuming it is can have tragic outcomes. Climate change is one; pandemics are another. In this book, catastrophic warfare is a third. Waiting for the fourth horseman would seem unwise.

"—-Tatiana Schlossberg, New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

2020-10-13
A Princeton historian examines the shameful destruction of the environment as an instrument of war.

Ecocide, the destruction of ecosystems in order to bring suffering upon the people living within them, is not an international crime—not yet, anyway, although Kreike notes that “several individual states have defined ecocide as a crime.” Aggressor states that employ scorched-earth techniques of battling enemies can always plead military necessity—and so they often have in places such as the grain belt of the Ukraine or the Brabant in Holland, looting what they could carry and then destroying what they could not to deny provisions to other armies or even civilian populations. As Kreike notes of territories destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, when seed corn and corn for eating were stored and then burned together, an aggressor force can deny another population food for two years—which, of course, amounts to genocide. The author recounts numerous episodes of just that: the use of eco-terror tactics against the people of Sumatra by the Dutch at the turn of the 20th century, the twin roles of plague and starvation in crushing the Inca Empire, the “Famine of the Dams” wrought on Indigenous peoples in South Africa by the actions of the White government, which placed economic development above their survival. “Loss of the environmental infrastructure was disastrous in the semi-arid floodplain. During the wet season, it meant exposure to cold, humidity, and disease. During the dry season, it meant hunger, thirst, and blistering heat,” writes Kreike—and that instance of “environcide” was by no means confined to the floodplain of a South African river, but has instead been repeated in places such as the Amazon basin. Famine, plague, destruction of food and water supplies: It all adds up to a heady catalog of crimes that warring states have too often applied and show no signs of eschewing in future conflicts.

Waging war against the Earth is an old business, and this book provides ample—and dispiriting—evidence for it.

Kirkus Reviews