Environmental History and British Colonialism in India: A Prime Political Agenda

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE HAS DEVELOPED FROM A DESIRE TO DEVELOP A THEORETICAL position for "Nature" in the context of modernity. It argues that the near-total absence of theories of nature in modern Western social thought stands in stark contrast to the remarkable extent to which nature has assisted and indexed the rise of modernity itself. This historical-theoretical imbalance has had grave social consequences, and it calls for an urgent reintegration of nature in theoretical discourses. The recently emerging genre of "environmental history" has carved a small but significant niche for itself in this direction. Some exciting literature has been produced that addresses itself to the task at hand. It is interesting to note that even though, as a discipline, environmental history registers its rise in the West, particularly the United States in the early 1970s, most of the radical environmental histories that are being written today emanate from the "peripheral" zones of the global political economy. While the peripheries have been severely exploited for their raw materials and natural products in the international division of labor since the beginnings of the modern world-system, it is also strangely not coincident that in the cultural division of labor, so to speak, these peripheries [End Page 113] have been seen as part of the wild, natural world, whereas the core, Western regions have portrayed themselves as bearers of civilization and cultural advancement. Thus, it is appropriate that some of the radical environmental histories have committed themselves to analyzing the environmental impact of colonialism on peripheral societies. I would like to propose the term environmental colonialism as a metaphor and point of departure through which I will locate and critique practices and structures of colonial-capitalist-modernity over the last five hundred years, along with the different strategies, discourses, and narratives employed to enact environmental colonialism in different parts of the earth.