Imperialism and the natural world

Imperialism and the natural world PDF Author: John M. MacKenzie
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526123673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.

Imperialism and the natural world

Imperialism and the natural world PDF Author: John M. MacKenzie
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526123673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.

Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires

Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires PDF Author: John MacDonald MacKenzie
Publisher: John Donald
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Originally delivered as the Callander Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1995, this is a survey of the historiography of the environmental history of the British Empire, suggesting new modes of analysis and connections with the Scottish experience.

The Empire of Nature

The Empire of Nature PDF Author: John MacDonald MacKenzie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Imperialism was more than a set of economic, political, and military phenomena. It was a habit of mind, a dominant idea in the era of European world supremacy which had widespread intellectual, cultural, and technical expressions. Changing approaches to hunting constitute an important theme in human history. The pursuit and killing of animals has invariably developed ideological overtones and both literature and the pictorial arts have tended to stress the mythic, courtly, and martial rather than the purely practical aspects of the chase. Nineteenth century European hunters—aware of this rich tradition—turned hunting into a symbolic activity of global dominance, and thus of the culture of imperialism. Hunting was closely connected to economics, social functions, the study of natural history, and the technological development of firearms, while being subject to complex legislation. This volume examines hunting as one focus of the interaction of Europeans with Africans and Indians, while illuminating the nature of imperial power when exercised in the relationship between humans and the natural world.

Environment and Empire

Environment and Empire PDF Author: William Beinart
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780199562510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
This volume uncovers the interaction between people and the elements in very different British colonies throughout the world. Providing a rich overview of socio-environmental change, driven by imperial forces, this study examines a key global historical process.

Humans versus Nature

Humans versus Nature PDF Author: Daniel R. Headrick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190864737
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
Since the appearance of Homo sapiens on the planet hundreds of thousands of years ago, human beings have sought to exploit their environments, extracting as many resources as their technological ingenuity has allowed. As technologies have advanced in recent centuries, that impulse has remained largely unchecked, exponentially accelerating the human impact on the environment. Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist, rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes--epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions--have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them. At the same time, he traces the history of anthropogenic changes in the environment--species extinctions, global warming, deforestation, and resource depletion--back to the age of hunters and gatherers and the first farmers and herders. He shows how human interventions such as irrigation systems, over-fishing, and the Industrial Revolution have in turn harmed the very societies that initiated them. Throughout, Headrick examines how human-driven environmental changes are interwoven with larger global systems, dramatically reshaping the complex relationship between people and the natural world. In doing so, he roots the current environmental crisis in the deep past.

Ecological Imperialism

Ecological Imperialism PDF Author: Alfred W. Crosby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107569877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
A fascinating study of the important role of biology in European expansion, from 900 to 1900.

The East India Company and the Natural World

The East India Company and the Natural World PDF Author: V. Damodaran
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349491094
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book is the first to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The contributors – drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857.

The Nature of German Imperialism

The Nature of German Imperialism PDF Author: Bernhard Gissibl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781785331756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Today, the East African state of Tanzania is renowned for wildlife preserves such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Selous Game Reserve. Yet few know that most of these initiatives emerged from decades of German colonial rule. This book gives the first full account of Tanzanian wildlife conservation up until World War I, focusing upon elephant hunting and the ivory trade as vital factors in a shift from exploitation to preservation that increasingly excluded indigenous Africans. Analyzing the formative interactions between colonial governance and the natural world, The Nature of German Imperialism situates East African wildlife policies within the global emergence of conservationist sensibilities around 1900.

Nature, Culture, Imperialism

Nature, Culture, Imperialism PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195634280
Category : Human ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Environmental history, the study of changing human relations with the natural world, is a fast developing field of historical enquiry. In both ecological and cultural terms, South Asia is characterized by an unparalleled diversity. It thus offers unique possibilities for the environmentalhistorian. Ecological degradation, and the social conflicts that have come in its wake, have further underlined the need for historical research in this field.

Frontiers of Science

Frontiers of Science PDF Author: Cameron B. Strang
Publisher: Omohundro Ins
ISBN: 9781469640471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.