Commodities, Colonial Science, and Environmental Change in Latin American History

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Latin American environmental history builds on and enriches the field's traditional orientation toward colonialism, capitalism, and conservation. This essay analyzes four themes present in this new environmental history research: the transnational study of commodities that incorporates global, national, and local scales; the role of the state in shaping historical human-environment interactions; the social and cultural production of environmental knowledge and geographical science; and the varying approaches to landscape change that partially parallel disciplinary divisions in the way scholars conceptualize nature and explain environmental change in Latin America. These four themes reveal productive approaches, methods, and topics to guide future environmental histories not only of Latin America but of other world regions as well.