Environment and Empire, by William Beinart and Lotte Hughes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Environment and Empire Harriet Ritvo (bio) Environment and Empire, by William Beinart and Lotte Hughes; pp. xiv + 395. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, £35.00, $85.00. Environment and Empire effectively engages two enormous topics. And if the authors' interpretation of the second element of their title is relatively narrow (the British Empire only, as opposed to empire in general), their interpretation of the first element is extremely broad. It includes urban and rural places, economic activities of all kinds, cultural constructions, and physical transformations. To some extent, this scope was predetermined, [End Page 173] along with the volume's extensive chronological and geographical range. Environment and Empire is part of Oxford University Press's supplements to its five-volume History of the British Empire; other companion topics include race, gender, missions, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, each of which could itself be the subject of a multi-volume survey. Limited to a single volume of moderate length, William Beinart and Lotte Hughes have wisely decided not to attempt a survey. Instead, they examine a series of judiciously selected cases, each of which is the focus of a single chapter. The cases are organized in roughly chronological order, and they also represent the geographical diversity of the British Empire. The cases also suggest the variety of political and administrative arrangements that were subsumed under the general rubric of "empire." They show that the nature of imperial governance and the period of time that a given locale belonged to the Empire both had great influence on the extent to which its environment was affected and the nature of those effects. Beinart and Hughes are careful to examine both settler colonies and colonies where human populations were not supplanted. Some of the chapters focus on specific cases (for example, rubber plantations in Malaysia), some explore relatively restricted comparisons (for example, irrigation and agriculture in India and Egypt), and some have an Empire-wide scope (for example, the visual representation of nature). Although each case is developed independently, the chapters are linked through explicit connections and also through recurrent concerns. In the first half of the book, Beinart and Hughes emphasize the important role of "commodity frontiers," defined as "the results of expanding European commercial activity, productive enterprises, and sometimes settlement, which targeted raw materials and land in overseas territories" (2). In the second half, they focus on the emergence of the conservation movement and other, more radical modes of resistance to imperial environmental management during the last two centuries. The chapters that deal with relatively recent periods raise issues that remain unresolved, politically as well as historically, which the authors frankly acknowledge. Inevitably a work of this design is based on secondary sources. Each chapter distills a great deal of previous scholarship, and because of the special nature of environmental history, this scholarship is drawn from an unusually wide range of disciplines. Beinart and Hughes have produced a series of brief yet illuminating syntheses of work on complex and important topics. In each chapter, they begin by summarizing the particular interaction between environment and empire that is its focus, then place it in its political and economic context. As they distill the research of other scholars, they also comment on historiographical trends and, especially, on the historiographical disagreements that frequently arise in this highly politicized field. For example, although they repeatedly emphasize the major environmental transformations caused by imperialism, they also persuasively connect colonial regimes of environmental management with those in place before and after. Further, since an understanding of environmental developments requires an understanding of their botanical, zoological, epidemiological, geological, and meteorological contexts, Beinart and Hughes draw on the research of scientists as well as of humanists and social scientists. For example, in their discussion of the environmental aspects of the slave trade and Caribbean plantations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they emphasize the relation between European consumption patterns and the establishment [End Page 174] of the plantation system, as well as the botanical history of the crops (especially sugar) selected for cultivation. They describe the slow journey of sugarcane from its domestication in New Guinea through South Asia to the Mediterranean. Along the way, the...