Introduction: Histories: Literary, Natural, Planetary

Abstract

Abstract: In a series of recent publications, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the planetary crisis triggered by climate change marks the disappearance of the boundary between natural history and human history, rendering our existing narratives of capitalist globalization and the political inadequate. Yet, by framing the problem in such broad, apocalyptic terms, scholarship on literary environmentalism has tended to make the Anthropocene a keyword for historiography while evacuating the term of any historical specificity, although a generation of environmental historians has offered compelling analyses of ecological transformations on regional, national, and global scales. Whether we locate the beginnings of the Anthropocene in plantation agriculture and resource extraction in the colonial world or in rational modes of land management, pasturage, and reliance on fossil fuels at home, literary and extra-literary works in the eighteenth century exhibit an awareness of human impacts on, and epochal changes in, the environmental system. The introduction provides an overview of essays in the special issue, outlining the ways in which the contributors avoid large, mythic generalizations about planetary or human history in favor of a series of place-based, historically attuned inquiries into human engagement with the environment across the long eighteenth century.