Commonwealth Forestry & Environmental History: Empire, Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand
EDITOR- Vinita Damodaran and Rohan D’Souza
| HB ₹1895 |
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INFORMATION
- EDITOR : Vinita Damodaran and Rohan D’Souza
- HB ISBN : 978-93-89850-17-8
- Year : 2020
- Extent : 618 pp.
- Discount available on checkout
- Usually dispatched within 3 to 5 working days.
Contemporary anxieties about global warming and climate change impacts have unsettled the ways in which we think about environmental politics and human history. Intense discussions have already begun over whether we need to reconsider what we understand by the term ‘environmental change’ and if humans have truly become a ‘geo-physical’ force. Put differently, how should we recast our understanding of the planet’s varied environmental pasts in order to make sense of the Anthropocene present?
This collection of 19 essays on forestry and environmental change in the erstwhile colonies of the British
Empire—today comprising the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’—builds on Richard Grove’s quest for achieving a ‘global synthesis’ as efforts towards writing environmental histories on a planetary scale. The Commonwealth of Nations as a single environmental bloc for study, enquiry and historical scrutiny, explores connected environmental histories, compares dissimilar ecological regions and debates ideologies for environmental management.
Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History is intended to enable conversations between environmental historians, foresters, sustainable development practitioners, policy makers and those keen on understanding contemporary politics brought on by concerns about climate change.
Vinita Damodaran is a historian of modern India, interested in sustainable development dialogues in the global South, particularly in questions of environmental change, identity and resistance in eastern India and has used historical records to understand climate change in the Indian Ocean World. Her publications include Broken Promises: Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar (1992); Nature and the Orient: Essays on the Environmental History of South and South-East Asia (1998); Post Colonial India, History Politics and Culture (2000); The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011); East India Company and the Natural World (2014). She is currently the Director of the Centre for World Environmental History at Sussex.
Rohan D’Souza is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University (Japan). He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (2006) and has edited, along with Deepak Kumar and Vinita Damodaran, The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011). His research interests and publications centre around themes related to environmental history, technology studies, sustainable development and current concerns with environmental politics in the ‘epoch of the anthropocene’.