Environmental History and World History: Developments in Congruence

Reviewed by: A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles by Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry Frank Zelko A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By emily wakild and michelle K. berry. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. 200 pp. $24.95 (paperback). In 2011, Duke University Press released Antoinette Burton's A Primer for Teaching World History, the first book in its series "Design Principles for Teaching History." With Burton as editor, the series promised numerous helpful volumes for those teaching various aspects of transnational and global history. Like a tree with an irregular fruiting cycle, however, the series did not bear any new books for a while. But 2018 proved a bumper crop, yielding Trevor Getz's primer on African history, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi Engineer Willoughby's A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History, and Wakild and Berry's environmental history volume. [End Page 232] With a quarter of a century of teaching experience between them, Wakild and Berry have taught environmental history in high schools, graduate seminars, and most everything in between. This book's goal is to help instructors, whether old hands or novices, design new courses or infuse environmental history into existing ones. From that perspective, the book succeeds admirably. It makes a case for the pedagogical and political importance of environmental history, suggests and breaks down numerous engaging texts and classroom exercises, offers concrete advice on assessment strategies, and urges instructors to take seriously the tools and student learning environments of the digital age. Readers of this journal will find the specific topics and case studies, frequently derived from the authors' global environmental history courses, particularly helpful, although I suspect not everyone will agree with all of their pedagogical imperatives. The first part of the book, titled "Approaches," contains four chapters that lay out a range of topics and learning objectives. The first examines how to make environmental history relevant to students' lives by linking it to their lunch. The focus is on food history, and the authors offer staples such as bananas, corn, and wheat as particularly useful and ubiquitous products to engage students in the history of plant domestication, agriculture, trade, and capitalism. Such an approach, they have found, pays "big dividends as your students begin to see nature and networks in everything" (p. 25). Chapter Two, "The Seed," sets out a list of learning objectives to help build a course. In line with the pedagogical theories emanating from university education departments, Wakild and Berry advocate prioritizing skill acquisition, such as locating and evaluating sources, over content knowledge. Those who take this stance frequently employ the "everything is on the internet" argument to downplay the importance of content. Wakild and Berry do not go this far, but their heavy emphasis on learning objectives and skill acquisition is nonetheless contestable. One can also make the case that well-presented content is vital to engaging students' initial interest in a subject and that skill building is more effective once this interest has been fully engaged. Furthermore, Wakild and Berry's discussion seems predicated on small classes in which instructors have the time and wherewithal to deeply immerse students in small group activities. Over the past decade, I have taught a first year global environmental history course with over 150 students. Wakild and Berry's intensive skill-oriented approach sounds like it would be difficult to implement in large classes; in my experience, a content-driven approach is both more realistic and more likely to hook students who might subsequently [End Page 233] enroll in smaller upper level classes where instructors can devote greater emphasis to skills and methods. The chapter on integrating animals into history is one of the book's highlights, reminding us how historians frequently neglect the lives of other species. In keeping with Levi-Strauss's famous formulation, animals are "good to think," Wakild and Berry cogently demonstrate how the interdisciplinary insights of the "animal turn" can undermine anthropocentric histories while at the same time offering compelling material for lectures and discussions. For those wondering how to integrate such material, the authors offer a chapter titled "The Hatchet," a set...

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables Preface Acknowledgments Part One: Overview 1. Introduction: World History and Environmental History Kenneth Pomeranz 2. The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment Edmund Burke III 3. Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land John F. Richards Part Two: Rivers, Regions, and Developmentalism 4. The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E.-2 C.E. Edmund Burke III 5. The Transformation of China's Environment, 1500-2 Kenneth Pomeranz 6. The Rhine as a World River Mark Cioc 7. Continuity and Transformation: Colonial Rice Frontiers and Their Environmental Impact on the Great River Deltas of Mainland Southeast Asia Michael Adas Part Three: Landscapes, Conquests, Communities, and the Politics of Knowledge 8. Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective William Beinart 9. Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Landscapes, and Ecologies Mahesh Rangarajan 10. Latin American Environmental History: A Shifting Old/New Field Lise Sedrez 11. The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History Douglas R. Weiner Select Bibliography List of Contributors Index

Think globally, act locally’ has become a call to environmentalist mobilization, proposing a closer connection between global concerns, local issues and individual responsibility. A History of Environmentalism explores this dialectic relationship, with ten contributors from a range of disciplines providing a history of environmentalism which frames global themes and narrates local stories.Each of the chapters in this volume addresses specific struggles in the history of environmental movements, for example over national parks, species protection, forests, waste, contamination, nuclear energy and expropriation. A diverse range of environments and environmental actors are covered, including the communities in the Amazonian Forest, the antelope in Tibet, atomic power plants in Europe and oil and politics in the Niger Delta. The chapters demonstrate how these conflicts make visible the intricate connections between local and global, the body and the environment, and power and nature. A History of Environmentalism tells us much about transformations of cultural perceptions and ways of production and consuming, as well as ecological and social changes. More than offering an exhaustive picture of the entire environmentalist movement, A History of Environmentalism highlights the importance of the experience of environmentalism within local communities. It offers a worldwide and polyphonic perspective, making it key reading for students and scholars of global and environmental history and political ecology.

Water, Bodies, Space:New Directions in World Environmental History Jack Bouchard Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. By faisal husain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 278 pp. ISBN 9780197547274. $35.00 (hardcover); $35.00 (ebook). An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic. By kate luce mulry. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 362 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9526-7. $35.00 (hardcover); $35.00 (ebook). Mapping Nature Across the Americas. Edited by kathleen a. brosnan. and james r. akerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. xii + 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-69643-0. $70.00 (hardcover); $69.99 (ebook). Sometimes it is the sudden intrusion of new questions, and the unexpected perspectives they offer, into the field of World History which has galvanized efforts to push our work and teaching forward in new directions. What does the Ottoman Empire look like from the viewpoint of a marsh in southern Iraq? How could England's Charles II dream of improving his subject's physical health in eastern England by radically transforming the landscape in which they lived? What does an Indigenous place-name on a European colonial map signify, and what can that tell us about local ecologies? These are some of the inquiries posed by a new generation of environmental historians, and they speak to the potential for their works to change how we study the past on a global scale. We are living through a transformative moment in the field of environmental history. The climate crisis has catalyzed both a surge in interest and a revolution in methods. Not only are more and more [End Page 133] explicitly "environmental history" studies appearing on the market, but increasingly other fields are producing works with an environmental inflection. A proper survey of recent publications in environmental history is becoming increasingly untenable, given the volume of output, such that to understand these transformations it is useful to examine the edges of the field, the places where scholars are pushing into new subject, methods, and conceptual approaches. Three new works offer a snapshot of the evolving field, and its potential to contribute to world history: Faisal Husain's Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire; Kate Luce Mulry's An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic; and Mapping Nature Across the Americas, a collected volume edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman. ________ Faisal Husain's Rivers of the Sultan is a wonderful addition to global environmental history, and a welcome contribution to histories of the Mideast and early modern empires. Of the three works, Husain's is perhaps the most explicitly environmental but also the most ambitious in its methods, combining several overlapping environmental history approaches. Rivers of the Sultan explores the history of the Tigris-Euphrates basin from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. As Husain argues, historians have treated these waterways as "dismembered bodies," a practice which flies in the face of science, historical memory, and the behavior of states. This new study instead "[adopts] a hydro-scale that considers the fluvial system as a continuous whole. Unified under Ottoman hegemony, the natural drainage pattern of the twin rivers fostered intimate bonds between upstream and downstream provinces, transporting not only water and sediment but also boatloads of men, guns, and grain that cemented the Ottoman presence in the east" (p. 5). This builds on recent advancements in water history, and a push for more river-stories in our literature.1 Such an integrative approach allows him to explain the ways that regional hydrographies and ecologies were exploited by, and thwarted, the Ottoman state: "From the sixteenth century, Istanbul put this natural [End Page 134] waterwheel to work for the benefit of its imperial project" (p. 3). We are meant to see empire from the perspective of a riverbank, and the view upends how historians have spatially oriented Ottoman history. Husain's work is divided into three parts. Part I, "The Amphibious State," examines the problem of fortification and shipbuilding in the Ottoman Empire and Tigris-Euphrates basin more broadly to understand the practical...

Notes on Contributors

In 2012 the historian Julia Adeney Thomas restrained her temper but unleashed a warning. The occasion was a forum in the American Historical Review on ‘historiographic “turns” in critical perspective’. The perspectives offered were critical enough, Thomas wrote in praise of the other authors, but the forum had a blind spot: ‘alongside the turns analyzed here, a world-altering force has been emerging, one larger, more devastating, and more definitive even than “contemporary flexible forms of capitalism”: I speak of climate change – or climate collapse – and all of its related global transformations’. Since then, some intersectional scholars have gone beyond that to argue that climate collapse and racial capitalism are not separate topics at all, but are bound together by white supremacy and lingering forms of European imperialism. Over the past decade some environmental historians have grappled with these connections and deployed new frameworks for thinking about scale, the interdependence of the local and the global, the implications of a Euro-centric analytical framework for our understanding of the world and the relationship between economic systems and environmental change. Although they have developed separately, both environmental history and global history have called upon historians of Europe to rethink boundary making in their methodologies and in their categories of analysis. In an era of global climate catastrophe, global pandemic and global economic crisis, where does the ‘European’ environment end?

Oil Palm: A Global History

This study has focused on studying Chinese medical history for the past 10 years (2010-2019). There has been no overall introduction to how the study of Chinese medical history has been carried out so far in Korea. To understand the trend for the recent 10 years, understanding of the period before that is needed. This study had classified the study trend of Chinese medical history from the 1950s when the study of Chinese medical history started in full swing until the last 10 years into the following three periods: First period: internal study period on Chinese medical history (the 1950s-1980s) Second period: external study period on Chinese medical history (the 1980s-1990s) Third period: diverse study period on Chinese medical history through integration and communication (2010-2019) There can be an opinion that various studies by each period have not been adequately reflected, and the classification has been excessively simplified. For example, the internal study has been considerably performed in the second period, and the consciousness of conflict between the internal study and external study remains in the third period. Nonetheless, the keywords that connote each period's characteristics for the past 70 years are considered the keywords presented above. The study of Chinese medical history has mainly placed importance on the modern times. Indeed, no change has been present as well. However, the fact that the study on the Chinese pre-modern medical history in Korean academia for the past 10 years has quantitatively grown from just a comparison of the number of papers can be identified. Also, the researchers and study themes have been confirmed to be diversified. In the past, ancient Chinese medicine was understood as a connection between Taoism and medicine. The environmental history researchers dealt with the connection between natural disasters and diseases, and just a few studies in the fields of medicinal herb distribution and the viewpoint of the body were carried out. Meanwhile, studies from the pre-Qin Dynasty to the Han Dynasty were carried out based on new data such as the archaeological relics and bamboo and wooden slips in the Korean academia for the past 10 years. Discovering new data is undoubtedly a driving force to activate studies. Studies on the Tang Dynasty Medical System and laws based on 'Chunsungryeong' are significant achievements connecting the Qin Dynasty & Han Dynasty and the Song Dynasty & Yuan Dynasty. Identification of each period's medical system in medical history is the most essential thing, and the combination of environment and medical history is conducted. It is significant to examine medical history from the viewpoint of the academic disciplines' integration. Approaching medical history from the female viewpoint has already started in the U.S., Europe, and Taiwan, and it is nice that such a study has been conducted in Korean academia. There are not many researchers on Chinese medical history in Korean academia. As several researchers have led the study, the study's concentration on specific periods or specific themes cannot be denied. The integration of systematic research achievements from the pre-Qin Dynasty until the Qing Dynasty is still minimal. Specifically, the study on pre-modern medical history targets a more extensive period than the study on modern medical history; therefore, researchers' density is low. This is why the possibility of intersection is not high in the period, region, and theme between researchers. This can be the source of an evaluation that study on medical history chain is sparse. It is wistful that the study continuity or systematic research is lacking. To overcome such a limitation, existing researchers need to conduct collaborative joint planning and research centered on particular themes through cooperation. They need to complement the study's sparse part in medical history through multidisciplinary co-research. Beyond the research centered on country study history, attempts to understand history as global history are being carried out. Studies on the exchange and interrelations between Western medicine and Chinese medicine have been performed in Chinese medical history. Nonetheless, studies on the exchange and interrelations of medical knowledge, medical systems, medicinal herbs, medical books, medical workforce, and diseases (epidemics) from global history are insufficient. Studies on a medical history that started from Chinese science and technology development history in the 1950s are developing to discuss one theme diversely. Plenty of studies on Chinese medical history need to be performed in various fields, including environmental history, the history of women, archeology, humanities, humanities therapy, integrated medical humanities, medical literature, medical theory, and medical system, which are the traditional fields.

General Labour History of Africa: Workers, Employers and Governments, 20th–21st Century

This chapter provides a historical account of the emergence of American environmental history mainly from American environmentalism in the 1960s, traces the transformation of the field to a mature subject asserting how America became the pioneer and trend-setter in the birth of environmental history as a separate discipline within history. The works of environmental historians from early thinkers like Walter Prescott Webb to recent scholars like Donald Worster have been incorporated with an analytical treatment. It captures the South-Asian perspective of looking into and understanding American environmental history bringing out the sharp lines of bifurcation between ‘ecology of affluence’ and ‘environmentalism of the poor’. The chapter finally ends with theorizing what it calls the ‘World Environment History’. Environmental history as a separate sub-set or sub-discipline of history actually emerged out of the growing environmental crisis due to massive industrialization and urbanization that paved the way towards preservationist, conservationist approaches, and environmental movement or environmentalism in the United States. Concern for nature reflected much earlier in the writings of scholars like Thucydides and Herodotus and also in the narratives of Fernand Braudel (Braudel was perhaps the first historian of the Annales school who wrote the history of the Mediterranean world beginning it with a chapter on ‘The Role of Environment’ in 1939), Le Roy Ladurie, Bodin, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, More and Bacon, but there is a need to understand the bifurcatory line between environmental consciousness and environmental history as a discipline. The US was the pioneer and trend-setter in the birth of environmental history as a separate discipline of history with its well-sketched out methodological canon.

IN THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, and especially in the last ten years, environmental history in the United States has become a recognized field with a strong core of both individual and institutional support. An increasing number of historians are specializing in it. Graduate students can now study with prominent environmental historians in Ph.D. programs at several institutions and can earn a doctorate in the field. The number of academic conferences focused on environmental studies and history have proliferated in the 1990s. Environmental historians have also had their own organization, the American Society for Environmental History, and journal, the Environmental History Review (recently merged with Forest and Conservation History into a new journal, Environmental History, with a combined subscription list of about 2,000), since the mid1970s. Attendance at the biennial ASEH meeting continues to grow. Many history departments in American universities now also offer introductory-level courses in the field. History departments in the West, where the field has deeper roots, have long had courses on the books in environmental history, but universities in other regions are now also offering courses. Many also have environmental studies programs or even separate institutes or colleges that include environmental history as part of their curriculum. Some departments and programs are also now offering advanced courses that often cross disciplinary, as well as na-

‘Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective’, in Edmund Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds), The Environment and World History, Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 211-28

Environmental History and International History

Environmental history came of age as a distinctive field, with its own journal and professional association, in the 1970s and 1980s. A disproportionate number of the most enduringly influential publications from that era centered on or dealt extensively with early America, but from 1990 until fairly recently environmental historians shifted their attention toward other times and places. This essay uses that divergence, together with a recent revival and convergence of early American scholarship with environmental history, to consider an array of issues that are central to both fields and to historical scholarship as a whole, including the relationships between decisions about periodization, scale, and theories of causation; the nature of power within and between societies; and the possibilities and limits of interdisciplinary scholarship. The essay concludes with considerations of what we might better understand about environmental history as a whole in light of recent early Americanist scholarship and what we might learn about early America by attending more closely to the broader field of environmental history, as well as with reflections on the creative tensions between modern, premodern, Americanist, and global histories. This article is based on the 2017 WMQ-EMSI workshop, “Early American Environmental Histories.”

William Pencak, editor of Pennsylvania History , wrote in 1996: Pennsylvania’s history cannot be understood without reference to the regions around it. Pennsylvania’s role in the development of the Southern backcountry and the Ohio Valley, trade and culture in the Delaware Valley, and the contrasting rise of New York and Pennsylvania as the nation’s leading industrial and commercial states in the nineteenth century are only three obvious areas in which understanding Pennsylvania benefits from a regional perspective. Pencak was explaining to readers why the journal had decided no longer to focus narrowly on Pennsylvania history, but rather, as its new subtitle would declare, to become A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . Pencak’s stated reasons focus explicitly on aspects of cultural, social, and economic history, but his observation that the history of Pennsylvania cannot be fully understood without reference to broader regional trends holds just as true for environmental history. Rivers and streams, winds and rain, migratory wildlife and the commercial incentives that so often drive human-environmental interactions are notoriously poor observers of political boundaries.