Reviewed by: Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change ed. by Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett M. Bennett Samuel Dolbee Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change. Edited by ulrike Kirchberger and brett m. bennett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 278 pp. ISBN 978-1-4696-2. $29.95 (paper). In the 1880s, the Swiss biologist Johann Bütikoffer went to Liberia as part of a Dutch-funded expedition in search of the pygmy hippopotamus. Unable to find the animal, Bütikoffer sought the help of local people, and showed them a drawing of a "brownish-reddish" creature (p. 151). They told him that they had never seen such a thing. The hippo they were familiar with was "black and a bit greenish." It turned out that the drawing had not been based on observation of the creature in West Africa, but rather had been completed based on the skins of hippos taken from Africa to Europe, where the material remains of the animal had changed in color over time. Hence the confusion, adeptly chronicled by historian Stephanie Zehnle in Environments of Empire, a volume edited by Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett M. Bennett based on a workshop held at the University of Kassel in 2015. As demonstrated by the "brownish-reddish" pygmy hippo—an image of which graces the book's cover—imperial understanding and control of environments was never complete or clear, even if always consequential. And the authoritative version of science that emerged from these violent encounters often relied on the knowledge and labor of local people whose names were largely excised from history. Zehnle's account and the volume's others are histories of ecology and imperialism. But they are distinct from Alfred Crosby's 1986 [End Page 722] Ecological Imperialism, which Ulrike Kirchberger identifies as a field-defining book in the volume's introduction. In Kirchberger's view, the volume's main contribution is a "wider comparative and transnational" scope than that offered by Crosby and the wave of work that followed (p. 1). The volume also poses different methodological approaches, primarily having to do with the question of nonhuman agency. In some chapters, we see imperial challenge (if not necessarily failure), with Alexander van Wickeren showing how Cuban tobacco did not acclimatize to France, Samuel Eleazer Wendt tracing how plant diseases afflicted cotton and rubber plantations in German Togo and Cameroon, and Idir Ouahes revealing how locusts and bovine plague undermined agrarian designs in French Syria and Lebanon. In other chapters, we see how imperial institutions gathered and recirculated knowledge about the environment through case studies by Semih Çelik on the Natural History Museum in Istanbul, Florian Wagner on the world-famous Buitenzorg experimental farm in Dutch Java, and Carey McCormack on the collecting practices of Joseph Hooker in British India. And still other chapters squarely foreground nonhuman agency. Zehnle, Jodi Frawley, and Nicole Y. Chalmer suggest how the aforementioned pygmy hippo as well as oysters and feral horses respectively all shaped and were shaped by imperialism. The sum is an image of empire at once more constrained and more intentional than what emerges from Crosby's famous work. Most significantly, the combined chapters—clustered, as they are, between 1870 and 1939—offer insight into the experts who mobilized knowledge of the environment to advance empire. Political economy guided these efforts, which tellingly involved the struggle against the coffee berry borer, as well as the smuggling of cinchona from South America to Java for the purpose of developing quinine and fighting malaria. And while the sources reveal more of imperial power structures than, say, peasants' experiences of these structures, a number of chapters nevertheless make concerted efforts to read against the grain. Altogether, the chapters shed light not only on ecologies and imperialism but also the role of knowledge in these endeavors. The volume's epilogue moves in a historiographical direction, as Brett M. Bennett surveys historians' suspicion and scientists' embrace of Ecological Imperialism. In response, Bennett champions an interdisciplinary synthesis by connecting Crosby's claims with the scientific field of "invasion ecology." The science, Bennett argues, largely confirms the vision of Crosby, in which plants and animals spread...