Forests, Foragers, and Empires: Socionatural Histories of Southern India explores the complex histories of south Indian forests and foragers, focusing on historical recognitions and misrecognitions emerging from prior assumptions about human and non-human history, and about presumed fundamental characteristics of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Many of these essays focus on the hunting and gathering peoples of southern India, especially as they have articulated with others throughout the Holocene. Other essays consider the larger-scale landscape histories within which these are situated, from the forests themselves to local and long-standing networks of production, trade, and power. These histories include multiple forms of agency—kings, hunters, merchants, farmers, sailors, city-dwellers, and of course plants, animals, and the forests themselves. This collection of essays aims to reinsert both forests and foragers into mainstream South Asian history, including the history of European colonial expansion and conquest, as well as those of other imperial polities.

Content:

List of Maps, Figures, Plates and Tables

FRAMEWORKS

Introduction

1. Forest Products in a Wider World: Early Historic Connections in Southern India
2. Historicizing Adaptation, Adapting to History: Forager-traders in South and Southeast Asia
3. Environmental History, the Spice Trade, and the State in South India
4. Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock: Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation

FORAGERS

Introduction

5. Historicizing Foraging in South Asia: Power, History, and Ecology of Holocene Hunting and Gathering
6. Coercion, Resistance, and Hierarchy: Local Processes and Imperial Strategies in the Vijayanagara Empire
7. Inventing the Primitive Isolate: Imperial Margins and Anthropological Misrecognitions
8. Christians and Spices: Hidden Foundations and Misrecognitions in European Colonial Expansion to South Asia

FORESTS

Introduction

9. Losing Primeval Forests: Degradation Narratives in South Asia
10. Constructing Nature: Socionatural Histories of an Indian Forest

SOCIONATURES

  Introduction

11. Naturalizing Disaster: From Drought to Famine in Southern India
12. Risky Business: Rice and Intercolonial Dependencies in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans
13. Provincializing the Anthropocene: Eurocentrism in the Earth System
14. Empires as Ecosystem Engineers: Towards a Non-Binary Political Ecology

Afterword

Notes on Contributors

Index