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- Serie: Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History
- Sprache: Englisch
A COMPANION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
Equips both specialists and newcomers with the historical, intellectual, and political context for engagement with the environment
Providing multiple points of entry into a dynamic, fast-growing field, A Companion to Global Environmental History explores the many contours of the relationship between human societies and the natural world on which they depend. Bringing together essays by an international roster of both established experts and emerging scholars, this volume covers a uniquely broad range of temporal, geographic, thematic, and contextual approaches to the practice of global environmental history.
Thirty-three detailed chapters describe how the relationship between society and nature has changed over time, examine the various drivers of change and environmental transformations, survey different types of environmental thought and action around the world, and more.
Now in its second edition, the Companion is fully revised to reflect major research developments and new trajectories within the field. Updated chapters that present new evidence for longstanding debates and innovative applications of environmental history are accompanied by six entirely new chapters on India, China, Africa, early modern cities, global environmental governance, and European environmentalism.
Offering fresh insights into environmental thought, culture, policy, and politics, A Companion to Global Environmental History, Second Edition, is an ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate students and an invaluable reference for scholars, researchers, and environmental historians.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Maps and Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Global Environmental History: An Updated IntroductionnoteSet
What Is Environmental History?
Global Environmental History
The
Companion
Notes
Part I: Times
Chapter One: Global Environmental History
The Environment Shapes Paleolithic Humans and Human Affairs
Paleolithic Humans Shape the Environment
Neolithic Farmers Shape Themselves and Their Environments
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Two: The Ancient World, c. 500 BCE–500 CE
Problems of Periodization
Problems of Scholarship
Archaeology
Radiocarbon Dating
Paleoclimatology
Pollen Analysis
Dendrochronology and Anthracology
Environmental Factors in the Decline of Civilizations
Coda: Comparative Ancient Environmental History
Notes
Chapter Three: The Medieval World, 500–1500 CE
Sixth‐Century Disasters
The Middle East
China
Europe
Fourteenth‐Century Disasters
The Maya
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Four: The (Modern) World Since 1500
The Biological Old Regime, c. 1500
The Columbian Exchange, c. 1500–1600
The Ecological Limits of the Biological Old Regime
The Fossil‐Fuel Escape from the Biological Old Regime, 1800–1900
The Gap and the Making of the Global South, 1800–1900
The Great Departure in the Twentieth Century
Notes
Part II: Places
Chapter Five: The Environmental History of Southeast Asia
The Southeast Asian Region
The Natural Environment
Change Before Human Presence
The Arrival of Hominids and Humans
Foraging and Agriculture
Crops and Livestock
Shifting Agricultural Practices
Wet‐Rice Cultivation
Domesticated and Wild Animals
Forests and Forestry
Plantations and Mines
Southeast Asians in the Anthropocene
Notes
Chapter Six: The Environmental History of Africa
Riparian Settlements
Seas and Oceans
Vascon‐Era Africa
Camels and Caravels
Vascon era‐Southern Africa
Zimbabwe Plateau, Central and Eastern Africa
The Colonial Era
Loss of Political Independence, Loss of Ecological Control
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter Seven: The Environmental History of Latin America
The Region Before European Colonization
Conquest and Colonization
Export Orientations
Conservation
Current Trends and New Directions
Notes
Chapter Eight: The Environmental History of the United States
North America to 1750 CE
The Age of Revolutions to the Civil War
Reconstruction to the Great Depression
From World War II to the Present
Notes
Chapter Nine: The Environmental History of the Arctic and Subarctic
Arctic Migrations
Extinction, Depletion, and Conservation Before 1900
Colonization and the Transformation of Indigenous Economies
Nationalism and Conservation
Notes
Chapter Ten: The Environmental History of the Middle East
A Very Short History of Middle East Environmental History
Sources for Middle East Environmental History: Seasons of Want or Plenty?
Climate
Energy
Disease
Culture
Reform
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Eleven: The Environmental History of Australia
Origins of Environmental History in Australia
A Confluence of Disciplines on a Regional Environmental Scale
Australian Environmental Identity – A National Question?
Global Environmental Stories from Australia
Conclusion: Scaling Australia into Global Environmental History
Notes
Chapter Twelve: Oceania: The Environmental History of One‐Third of the Globe
Exploring and Colonizing Oceania
The Oceanic Environment as a Human Habitat
Cultural Determinism Versus Environmental Determinism
Cultural Ecology and the Matter of Scale
Islands and Relative Isolation
Culture Contact and the Impact of Precolonial European Influences
European Settler Societies and Plantation Colonies
The Pacific War and the Nuclear Age
Independence, Economic Viability, and Sustainable Development
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental History of the Soviet Union
Notes
Chapter Fourteen: The Environmental History of China
Geography and Climate
Biodiversity
Energy
Disease
Environment and Religions
Agriculture
Food
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Fifteen: The Environmental History of South Asia
Historiography
The Shifting Natural Environment of South Asia
Early Interactions Between Humans and the Natural World
Environmental Histories of South Asia Until Independence (1947)
Environmental History in Independent India (1947–), Pakistan (1947–), and Bangladesh (1971–)
Notes
Chapter Sixteen: The Environmental History of Central Eurasia
Climate
Pastoralism and Tribal Confederations
Plague and Pax Mongolica
Eurasian Imperialism and Colonialism
Collectivization and Socialism
Transboundary Waters, Air Pollution, and Conservation
Conclusion
Notes
Part III: Drivers of Change and Environmental Transformations
Chapter Seventeen: The Grasslands of North America and Northern Eurasia
The Great Plains
The Steppes
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Eighteen: Global Forests
Deep Forest History: Before People
People and Forests
Asia
Europe
North America
Twentieth‐Century Forests
Notes
Chapter Nineteen: Fishing and Whaling
Prehistoric and Ancient Fisheries
Medieval and Early Modern Fisheries
Modern Fisheries
Notes
Chapter Twenty: Riverine Environments
Holocene Riverscapes
Anthropocene Rivers
Conclusions: Locating the Rivers in the Late Anthropocene
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐One: War and the Environment
Hunter–Gatherer and Sedentary Farming Cultures
Agrarian and Pastoralist States
Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Global Empires in the Early Modern Era
Wars of the Industrial Era
World War I
World War II
Post‐1945
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐Two: Technology and the Environment
Agriculture, Nature, and Technology
The Plow
The Industrial Revolution and Agriculture
The Tractor
Concentrated Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs)
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)
Fisheries and Aquaculture
Urbanization, Industrialization, and the Environment
Air Pollution and Its Historical Roots
Industrial Pollution and Hazardous Waste
Cities as Technologies with Environmental Impacts
The Rise of Preservation and Conservation Movements
The Automobile
Large‐Scale Technological Systems and the State
The Technology of (Post‐)Modern Industrial Wastes
Military Technology
Technological Failure and the Environment
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐Three: Evolution and the Environment
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐Four: Climate Change in Global Environmental History
Origins, Methods, and Concepts
Background: Climate in Prehistory
Climate and Society in Antiquity and the Archaeology of Collapse
The Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age
Climate, Culture, and Colonialism
Global Warming in Historical Perspective
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐Five: Industrial Agriculture
Introduction
Origins
Reshaping Nature
Industrial Agriculture Goes Global
Nutritional Transitions
Conclusion: Industrial Agriculture and the Global Environment
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐Six: Biological Exchange in Global Environmental History
Introduction
Before Agriculture
Agrarian Societies and Overland Biological Exchange to 1400 CE
Seaborne Biological Exchange and Biological Invasion Before 1400 CE
Biological Globalization after 1400 CE
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐Seven: Urban Environmental History
Theorizing Global Urban Environments
A Developing Research Field
Premodern Cities and Colonial Histories
Waterscapes
Healthscapes
Urban Disasters
Conclusion
Notes
Part IV: Environmental Thought and Action
Chapter Twenty‐eight: Environmentalism in Brazil: A Historical Perspective
Introduction
The “Environmentalist” Intellectual Debate: 1790–1930
Natural Scientists, Laws, and National Parks: 1930–70
Confrontation in the Public Sphere: 1970–90
Professional and Multisectoral Environmentalism: 1990–Present
Notes
Chapter Twenty‐Nine: Environmentalism and Environmental Movements in China Since 1949
Early Chinese Environmental Thought and Legislation (1949–72)
Urban and Rural Health
Soil and Water Conservation
Changes in Chinese Environmental Thought and Consciousness (1972–2011)
Environmental Governance Within the Chinese State
Environmental NGOs in China
Notes
Chapter Thirty: Religion and Environmentalism
Research Deficits
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism
The Apocalypse Needs Prophets
Charismatic Animals in Noah’s Ark
The Ecological Reinvention of Buddhism and Spiritual Vagabonds
Notes
Chapter Thirty‐One: The Environmentalism of the Poor
Introduction
Causes of Environmental Conflicts
The Chipko Movement and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Southern Europe and Latin America
The GDP of the Poor
Two Ecuadorean Women
In India
In Mexico
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Thirty‐Two: Global Environmental Governance
Introduction
Beginning to 1945
Postwar Period: 1945–72
1972–92
Sustainable Development
Chemicals
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Thirty‐Three: Modern Environmentalism in Europe
Features of European Environmentalism
Enlightenment and Romanticist Ideas about Nature
The Rise of Nature Conservation Before World War I
Nationalism and Scientific Conservation in the Interwar Years
Postwar Divisions and Continuities
The Rise of Environmentalism
New Concerns Since the 1980s
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 13
Table 13.1 Soviet Infant Mortality, 1926–55
Chapter 25
Table 25.1 The impact of the Green Revolution: global average yield (in ton...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Map 2.1 Roman Empire, 395
CE.
Chapter 3
Map 3.1 The Black Death in Fourteenth‐Century Europe.
Chapter 5
Map 5.1 Southeast Asia.
Chapter 6
Map 6.1 Map of Africa.
Chapter 7
Map 7.1 Latin America.
Chapter 9
Map 9.1 The Circumpolar North.
Chapter 10
Map 10.1 The Middle East.
Chapter 11
Map 11.1 Australia, showing its six states (formerly colonies) as federated ...
Chapter 12
Map 12.1 The Pacific.
Map 12.2 Remote Oceania and Near Oceania.
Chapter 13
Map 13.1 The USSR.
Chapter 14
Map 14.1 China: Its Provinces and Demarcation Lines.
Chapter 15
Map 15.1 South Asia.
Chapter 16
Map 16.1 Central Eurasia.
Chapter 17
Map 17.1 The Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Chapter 18
Map 18.1 Changes in global forest cover over 8000 years. Based on
State of t
...
Chapter 20
Map 20.1 Rivers Featured in Chapter 20.
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1 Variations in global average temperature 1–2019
BCE
. This recons...
Figure 24.2 Modified Pfister‐Krämer model. This simplified schema helps visu...
Chapter 26
Map 26.1 Human settlement of the globe.
Map 26.2 Transitions to agriculture, 11,000–4000
BCE
.
Chapter 28
Map 28.1 Brazil.
Chapter 29
Map 29.1 Provinces, Regions, and Major Rivers of Modern China.
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Maps and Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Global Environmental History: An Updated Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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WILEY‐BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORYThis series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our current understanding of the past. Defined by theme, period, and/or region, each volume comprises between 25 and 40 concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The aim of each contribution is to synthesize the current state of scholarship from a variety of historical perspectives and to provide a statement on where the field is heading. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.
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A Companion to the Worlds of the RenaissanceEdited by Guido Ruggiero
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A Companion to the American RevolutionEdited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole
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A Companion to Latin American HistoryEdited by Thomas Holloway
A Companion to Russian HistoryEdited by Abbott Gleason
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A Companion to Mexican History and CultureEdited by William H. Beezley
A Companion to World HistoryEdited by Douglas Northrop
A Companion to Global Environmental HistoryEdited by J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin
A COMPANION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
Second Edition
Edited by
J. R. McNeill
and
Erin Stewart Mauldin
This edition first published 2025© 2025 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Edition HistoryBlackwell Publishing Ltd. (1e, 2012)
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: McNeill, John Robert, editor. | Mauldin, Erin Stewart, editor.Title: A companion to global environmental history / edited by John R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin.Other titles: Wiley‐Blackwell companions to history.Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2025. | Series: Wiley‐Blackwell companions to world history | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2024049810 (print) | LCCN 2024049811 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119988182 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119988199 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119988205 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119988212 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology–History–Cross‐cultural studies. | Global environmental change–History–Cross‐cultural studies. | Environmental policy–History–Cross‐cultural studies. | Environmental protection–History–Cross‐cultural studies.Classification: LCC GF13 .C63 2025 (print) | LCC GF13 (ebook) | DDC 304.209–dc23/eng/20241121LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024049810LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024049811
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Joseph Pennell/Wikimedia Commons
List of Maps and Figures
2.1
Roman Empire, 395
CE
3.1
The Black Death in Fourteenth‐Century Europe
5.1
Southeast Asia
6.1
Map of Africa
7.1
Latin America
9.1
The Circumpolar North
10.1
The Middle East
11.1
Australia, showing its six states (formerly colonies) as federated in 1901, with their capital cities
12.1
The Pacific
12.2
Remote Oceania and Near Oceania
13.1
The USSR
14.1
China: Its Provinces and Demarcation Lines
15.1
South Asia
16.1
Central Eurasia
17.1
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s
18.1
Changes in global forest cover over 8000 years
20.1
Rivers Featured in Chapter
24.1
Variations in global average temperature 1–2019
BCE
24.2
Modified Pfister‐Krämer model
26.1
Human settlement of the globe
26.2
Transitions to agriculture, 11,000–4,000
BCE
28.1
Brazil
29.1
Provinces, Regions, and Major Rivers of Modern China
Notes on Contributors
Michitake Aso is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he teaches courses on environmental, medical, and world history. He has published an award‐winning book, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History (UNC, 2018), which has been translated into Vietnamese. He is co‐editor of Fighting for Health: Medicine in Cold War Southeast Asia (NUS, 2024) and author of several articles and book chapters. He has held fellowships at Kyoto University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the National University of Singapore, and participated in NEH‐ and Luce‐funded grants.
Peter Boomgaard, who died in 2017, was professor of economic and environmental history of Southeast Asia at the University of Amsterdam and former director of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies at Leiden. His books include Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950 (2001), and Southeast Asia: An Environmental History (2007).
Iris Borowy is a distinguished professor at the University of Shanghai and director of the Center for the History of Global Development. She has worked at the University of Rostock, at the Centre Alexandre Koyré (Paris), and the University of Aachen (Germany). She has published widely on topics of global health, international organizations, and sustainable development, including a book on the Brundtland Commission (Routledge 2009) and the Routledge Handbook on the History of Development (2022). She is a founding co‐editor of the Yearbook for the History of Global Development.
Stephen Brain is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–53 (2011). He is currently completing a manuscript about the environmental history of Soviet agricultural collectivization.
Yuan Julian Chen received her PhD in history from Yale University and is currently a postdoctoral Franklin Humanities Fellow at Duke University. She is an environmental historian of China specializing in the era of the Song Dynasty. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including The Journal of Early Modern History and the Journal of Chinese History.
Janna Coomans is a university lecturer in medieval history at Utrecht University. She is the author of Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries(2021, Cambridge University Press). She was part of the ERC project “Healthscaping Urban Europe” and works on urban, social, and environmental history, including a research project on fire and risk in the Low Countries, 1250–1550.
Paul D’Arcy is a professor of Pacific history at the Australian National University. His research focuses on Asia Pacific resource conflict resolution, human interaction with the Pacific Ocean, Asia Pacific climate perturbation and natural hazard mitigation, and has been translated into four languages: Mandarin, French, German, and Spanish. He is the author of The People of the Sea (2006) and general editor of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean in Two Volumes (2023).
Michael J. Dockry is an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Forest Resources, as well as an associate faculty member of the American Indian Studies Department and an Institute on the Environment Fellow. He is a registered member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and works on tribal and Indigenous natural resource management and environmental history.
Michael H. Fisher is the Danforth Professor of history, Emeritus, Oberlin College, USA. Among his books are An Environmental History of India (Cambridge University Press, 2018), A Short History of the Mughal Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2015), Migration: A World History, (Oxford University Press, 2013), and (ed.) The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth Century Journey through India (University of California Press, 1997).
Yuan Gao is an assistant professor of Chinese History at Case Western Reserve University. She teaches courses on China, Central Eurasia, and environmental history. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the environmental history of Xinjiang under Qing rule.
Daniel Headrick is a professor emeritus of history and social science at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently, Humans Versus Nature: A Global Environmental History (2020), Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (2010), and Technology: A World History (2009).
J. Donald Hughes, who died in 2019, was Evans Professor of history at the University of Denver and a former president of the American Society for Environmental History. He authored Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (1993), What Is Environmental History (2006), and An Environmental History of the World (2009).
Faisal H. Husain is an environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Rivers of the Sultan (2021) and serves on the editorial boards for journals including Marmara Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi and Global Environment. He is currently working on an environmental history of Ottoman frontier expansion east of the Euphrates during the sixteenth century.
Iftekhar Iqbal is an associate professor at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and works in environmental history focusing on South and Southeast Asia. Previously, he taught at the University of Dhaka and received research fellowships from the British Academy and Humboldt Foundation. He is the author of The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change 1840–1943 (Palgrave 2010) and The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire in South and Southeast Asia (Forthcoming with Stanford University Press).
Paul Josephson is a professor emeritus of history at Colby College, Waterville, Maine. A specialist in big science and technology in the twentieth century, he is the author of 15 books, most recently Hero Projects (2024), Nuclear Russia (2022), Chicken (2020), and Traffic (2017). He is completing a global environmental history of the nuclear age.
Jeremiah Kitunda is a distinguished professor of history at Appalachian State University. Born and schooled in Kenya before he moved to Miami University (Ohio) and the University of Wisconsin‐Madison for graduate studies, Kitunda focuses his research on African culture and environment. He has authored A History of the Water Hyacinth in Africa: The Flower of Life and Death (2017) and Kamba Proverbs from Eastern Kenya: Sources, Origins & History (2021). For a short stint, he was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi and a visiting scholar at the University of Oregon (Eugene).
Nancy Langston is a distinguished professor of environmental history at Michigan Technological University. Author of five books and recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History, she is currently working on a history of global reindeer translocations. www.nancylangston.net.
Bao Maohong is a professor of history at Peking University, China. He is the author of Forest and Development: Deforestation in the Philippines (2008), Environmental Governance in China and Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia (2009), and The Origins of Environmental History and Its Development (2012).
Robert B. Marks is Diehl professor of history emeritus at Whittier College. He is the author of Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (1998), The Origins of the Modern World (2007), and China: Its Environment and History (2012). He is at work on a history of Mono Lake, California.
Joan Martinez‐Alier is emeritus professor of economics and economic history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a former president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He is the author of The Environmentalism of the Poor (2002) and Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice (2023).
Erin Stewart Mauldin is the John Hope Franklin Chair of Southern History at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (2018), and the co‐editor of the book series, Environmental History and the American South, at the University of Georgia Press.
Meredith McKittrick is an associate professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Her most recent book is Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (Chicago 2024). She is currently writing a book about riparian farming communities in southwestern Africa.
J. R. McNeill is distinguished university professor at Georgetown University and former president of the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association. His environmental history books include Something New under the Sun (2000), Mosquito Empires (2010), and The Great Acceleration (2016).
Jan‐Henrik Meyer is a social and environmental historian at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt, focusing on the emergence of European Union environmental and energy law and policy, transnational environmental movements, and the relations between nuclear energy, states and society in Europe. Recent publications include “Nuclear Power and Geography: How the European Communities Failed to Regulate the Siting of Nuclear Installations at Borders in the 1970s and 1980s” in Historical Social Research.
Alan Mikhail is the Chace Family Professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of several books in Ottoman environmental history, including Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (2011), The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (2014), and Under Osman's Tree (2017).
Shawn W. Miller is professor of history at Brigham Young University. His published work focuses on Latin America’s natural and constructed commons: Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford) investigates royal efforts to monopolize trees; An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge) won the Melville Prize and is being revised for a second edition; and The Street is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge) examines the vibrant utilities of public spaces and the violence that erupted with the automobile’s arrival. He is currently writing a history of the Pan‐American Highway.
David Moon is a specialist on Russian, Ukrainian, Eurasian, and transnational environmental history. His recent books include ed. with Catherine Evtuhov and Julia Lajus, Thinking Russia's History Environmentally (Berghahn, 2023) and The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s–1930s (Cambridge University Press, 2020. He is the editor of the journal Environment and History and emeritus professor at the University of York, UK.
Micah S. Muscolino is a professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009) and The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Emily O’Gorman is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and associate professor at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research is situated within environmental history, human geography, and the interdisciplinary environmental humanities and is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority, expertise, and landscapes. Her latest book is Wetlands in a Dry Land: More‐than‐human Histories of Australia’s Murray‐Darling Basin (University of Washington Press, 2021).
José Augusto Pádua is a professor of Brazilian environmental history at the Institute of History/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he also coordinates the Laboratory of History and Ecology. He is a past president of the Brazilian Association of Research and Graduate Studies on Environment and Society (ANPPAS). One of his more recent books, in association with John Soluri and Claudia Leal, is A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (2018).
Liza Piper is a professor of history at the University of Alberta. A specialist in Canadian environmental histories and histories of disease, she is the author of When Disease Came to This Country: Epidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America (Cambridge University Press 2023) and The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (UBC Press 2009) and has co‐edited interdisciplinary collections on activism and environmental humanities.
Joachim Radkau was professor of modern history at Bielefeld University, Germany, until his retirement in 2008. His most important publications on environmental history in English include Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (2008), Wood: A History (2011), and The Age of Ecology (2014).
Libby Robin is an environmental historian, emeritus professor at the Australian National University and fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. She works as a public historian with a range of museums and curators in Australia, Norway Sweden, Germany, and Estonia. Her most recent book is What Birdo Is That? A Field Guide to Bird People (2023). Earlier books include How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, co‐edited with Tom Griffiths (1997), and The Environment: A History of the Idea (2018) with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin.
Alan Roe earned his PhD from Georgetown University and is the author of Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Edmund Russell is the David M. Roderick Professor of technology and social change in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University and a former president of the American Society for Environmental History. He is the author of War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (2001), Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (2011), and Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History of England, 1200–1900 (2018).
Richard P. Tucker was professor of history at Oakland University and adjunct professor at the University of Michigan until his retirement. He is the author of Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (2000) and co‐editor with Edmund Russell of Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (2004).
Sam White is professor of political history at the University of Helsinki, editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (2018), and author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America (2017) among other publications. He currently researches past climates, migration, and the uses and politics of history.
Acknowledgments
Like its predecessor, this book represents a team effort. As editors, we register our appreciation to the platoon from Wiley. Sophie Bradwell initiated the revision of the original project and Anya Fielding helped us conceive of and organize the updates. Charlie Hamlyn initially managed the project, but it has been Radhika Raheja Sharma who has shepherded it to completion and gracefully agreed to every modification of plans along the way. Naveen Kumaran Shanmugam, copyeditor extraordinaire, deserves our gratitude in full measure.
When editors are rash enough to agree to revisit a decade‐old book that depends on updating original work from an international roster of authors, co‐authors, and brand‐new contributors, the probability that something will go badly wrong is considerable. Our authors defied the odds, writing their chapters promptly, answering our queries swiftly, and tolerating tweaks to their pearly prose with equanimity. We thank them for that.
John R. McNeill
Erin Stewart Mauldin
Global Environmental History: An Updated Introduction
J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin
This second, and much revised, edition of the Companion to Global Environmental History appears more than a decade after the original was published in 2012. That is a long time in the history of a young scholarly field. Since the 1970s, environmental history has evolved into a self‐conscious and self‐aware sub‐discipline that boasts journals, university programs, and international organizations devoted to its practice and promotion. Global environmental history, however, is much younger. Although a dynamic field with a steadily increasing number of practitioners, global environmental history remains, as yet, less clear in its structure, shape, and place within the historical profession.
This volume aims to orient readers to the fast‐growing arena of scholarly inquiry known as global, or world, environmental history. It is a collection of essays by 37 scholars from all six inhabited continents, some of whom were instrumental in the first establishment of environmental history, while others of whom are shaping the field’s latest twists and turns. The Companion to Global Environmental History surveys past developments in the field, current contours of scholarship, and possible approaches for the future. It is intended to be useful not only to people who are coming to environmental history for the first time – serving as the equivalent of a road map to the field – but also to people who have long labored in one province of environmental history, and, for whatever reason, seek to broaden their horizons and begin to develop comparative perspectives – or deepen their existing ones.
What Is Environmental History?
Like every other subset of history, environmental history represents different things to different people. Our preferred definition of the field is the study of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature on which they depended. Humankind has always been a part of nature, albeit a distinctive part. While the natural world has shaped and conditioned the human experience, over time, humans have made increasingly far‐reaching alterations to their surroundings. Environmental history recognizes that the natural world is not merely the backdrop to human events, but evolves in its own right, both of its own accord and in response to human actions. Nature is now both natural and cultural, at least in most places on Earth. Indeed human influence upon nature has attained such proportions that some scholars maintain life on Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Increasing use of this still controversial term signifies growing awareness in scientific circles of the burgeoning human environmental impact.1
The vast scope of environmental history invites many and varied approaches. There are, we think, three chief areas of inquiry, which of course overlap and have no firm boundaries. First is the study of material environmental history, the stories of human involvement with forests and frogs, with cholera and chlorofluorocarbons. This entails the examination of human impact on the physical, biological, and chemical environment as well as nature’s influence upon human affairs, each of which is always in flux and always affecting the other. This form of environmental history puts human history in a fuller context, that of the Earth and life on Earth, and recognizes that human events are part of a larger story in which humans are not the only actors. A full extension of this principle is the so‐called Big History pioneered by David Christian and Fred Spier,2 which places humans into the unfolding history of the universe and finds recurrent patterns over the largest timescales. In practice, however, most of the environmental history written in the material vein stresses the economic and technological side of human actions and thus concentrates on the last 200 years when industrialization (among other forces) greatly enhanced humankind’s power to alter environments.
Second is a form of cultural and intellectual history. It concerns what humans have thought, believed, and written that treats relationships between society and nature. It emphasizes representations and images of nature in art, literature, religion, and oral traditions, how these have changed, and what they reveal about the societies that produced them.3 The great majority of cultural environmental history is drawn from published texts, as with intellectual history, and often treats the works of influential (and sometimes not‐so‐influential) authors from Lucretius and Mencius to St. Francis to Mohandas K. Gandhi. This sort of environmental history tends to focus on individual thinkers, but it can also extend to the study of popular environmentalism as a cultural movement. The largest debate within this wing of environmental history, however, has been the relative impact of various religio‐cultural traditions on the natural world. This scholarship evaluates the texts and practices of Judeo‐Christian, Islamic, East Asian, and indigenous traditions, attempting to determine their effects on the environment.4
The third main form is political and policy‐related environmental history. This concerns the history of deliberate human efforts to regulate the relationship between society and nature, and among social groups in matters concerning nature. Although there are early examples of soil conservation, air‐pollution control, and royal efforts to protect charismatic animals for a monarch’s hunting pleasure, usually policy‐related environmental history extends back only to the late nineteenth century. Only in the era since 1880 have states and societies mounted systematic efforts to regulate interactions with the environment generally. Between 1880 and 1965, these efforts were normally spasmodic and often modest in their impacts, so much of this sort of environmental history deals with the decades since 1965, when both states and explicitly environmental organizations grew more determined and effective in their interventions. Political and policy environmental history is the approach that most easily dovetails with mainstream history for it often uses the nation‐state as its unit of analysis. Other types of environmental history tend to ignore political boundaries.
In practice, environmental history is all this and much more. More than most varieties of history, environmental history is an interdisciplinary project. Many scholars in the field trained as archeologists, geographers, or historical ecologists. In addition to the customary published and archival texts of the standard historian, environmental historians routinely use the findings culled from bio‐archives (such as pollen deposits which can tell us about former vegetation patterns) and geo‐archives (such as soil profiles that can tell us about past land‐use practices). The subject matter of environmental history is often much the same as that in historical geography or historical ecology, although the choice of sources emphasized normally differs. An illustration is the burgeoning field of climate history, which is pursued by scholars from at least half a dozen disciplines, including text‐based historians. Textual historians have found useful records for climate history going back many centuries, for example, the dates of grape harvests in European vineyards. Compiling and comparing these dates over centuries allows historians to draw strong inferences about past warming and cooling trends.5
Global Environmental History
Global environmental history has a compelling logic but presents a daunting aspect. Many ecological processes are global in scope, such as climate change or sea‐level rise, and many others are found here and there around the world, such as deforestation and urban air pollution. Several of the cultural trends concerning the environment have been nearly global too, most obviously the post‐1960s expression of ecological anxiety, although of course it finds different forms in different cultures.6 But global‐scale environmental history, like global and world history in general, is built upon the foundation of local work and regional surveys. No single historian can master the details of soil history or the history of water pollution around the world, just as no one can fully master the global history of wages and prices or of women’s movements. All global and world history presents this problem, and for many historians this alone suffices to make the venture illegitimate.
A moment’s reflection, however, should redeem the ambition of global‐scale history. Something is gained and something lost with any choice of scale. If historians required true mastery of their subjects, they could aim no more broadly than autobiography. There is no purely intellectual reason to prefer microhistory to macrohistory, whether environmental or otherwise. But it remains true that, practically speaking, bringing coherence to the subject of the global history of air pollution is much more difficult than, say, to the history of the killer fog of London in December 1952. Global environmental history, then, is often a process of stitching together scholarship from multiple geographic scales and perspectives to craft a narrative or an analysis of global ecological change.
For decades the only global environmental history syntheses came from authors who were not professional historians, and therefore less inhibited by their training and the anti‐global expectations of the historical profession. British geographers and a former civil servant of the United Kingdom wrote the first notable general surveys, the former in sober style and the latter with the panache of a muckraking journalist.7 Sociologists too joined the fray.8 Eventually natural scientists took aim at global historical treatments of subjects such as nitrogen and soil.9 A multidisciplinary magnum opus from 1990, B. L. Turner et al.’s The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, helped spur historians to try their hand at global environmental history.10
Professional historians began by taking slices of the whole, such as the books on global fire history by Stephen Pyne, or environmentalism by Ramachandra Guha.11 Pyne’s work, which grew out of his earlier studies of fire in American history, sought to discuss every aspect of the human relationship with fire, from cooking and the physiology of digestion to the cultural perceptions of wildfires. Guha’s short treatise on modern environmentalism showed the contrasts between the social movements that go by that name in, above all, India and the US. Joachim Radkau was perhaps the first to bring the sensibilities of the historian to general global‐scale environmental history in his Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt.12 His was not a survey aiming at worldwide coverage, but a sprawling series of soundings and reflections on everything from animal domestication to contemporary tourism in the Himalaya. It reads a bit like Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History with its bold comparisons and juxtapositions across time and space. Unlike Toynbee, Radkau was reluctant to offer grand pronouncements, preferring to honor historians’ traditional respect for the particularities of different times and places.13
A small squadron of professional historians brought out global‐scale environmental histories of one sort or another around the same time as Radkau. Brief surveys, apparently intended for classroom use, poured forth from Europe and the United States.14 A pair of longer studies took on slices of time that, their authors claimed, exhibited some coherence: John F. Richards surveyed the early modern centuries so strongly affected by European expansion, and J. R. McNeill portrayed the twentieth century as an era of unprecedentedly tumultuous environmental change.15 Still others presented thematic slices of global environmental history, penning accounts of warfare, deforestation, malaria, or the profit motive over several millennia.16 Wide‐ranging anthologies added to the sudden outpouring – and sidestepped the main limitation of global history, the inability of any single author to know enough.17 The British Empire, on which the sun famously never set, provided a framework that added coherence to global environmental history as shown in the overview by William Beinart and Lotte Hughes.18 To date no one has chosen to follow their example with respect to any other modern empires. However, imperialism more generally served as the occasion for one of environmental history’s foundational texts, Alfred W. Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, which, if it isn’t global environmental history, surely comes very close to it. Crosby sought to explain the successes and failures of European imperial ventures from the Crusades and Greenland Norse onward in environmental terms. And for modern imperialism, Corey Ross recently offered panoptic, multi‐imperial perspectives.19
So global environmental history has come a long way in a brief time. Lately, general overviews have appeared at a quickened pace and one should not expect that to slow.20 The persistent presence of environmental issues in modern life has made environmental history a permanent fixture of historiography rather than a passing fancy. The growing salience of climate concerns, deforestation, water shortages, and loss of biodiversity has convinced some historians, previously working far from environmental history, that it is no longer appropriate to write history without taking the environment, especially climate change, into account.21 Furthermore, global‐scale environmental history has benefited from the rise of world or global history, an intellectual response to the recent surge of globalization and, in the US at least, a practical response to political pressures upon school curricula.22 But, as always, further opportunities abound. Some day someone will write a global environmental history of railroads, of mining, of cattle, of the oceans, of computers, of religion, of odors, of things as yet unimagined.
The Companion
The second edition of this volume is organized much like the first. Although there are countless ways in which one could approach the endeavor of global environmental history, this volume combines temporal, geographic, and thematic sections. With contributions from an international roster of historians, the content of the chapters that follow is as diverse as the approaches to environmental history. Some authors emphasize natural and cultural history, while others focus on political and economic developments. Some chapters are surveys, others are historiographical, and many are a mix of the two.
As with the first edition, each author was given the freedom to update his or her chapter as the subject required and almost every chapter from the original volume has revisions or new material. There are still occasional overlaps in the subjects under discussion. For instance, the impact of the first human migrations into the Americas appears in four chapters, although the authors approach the subject with differing purposes and with sometimes contrasting conclusions. Readers will also notice that some subjects recur with regularity throughout the Companion, such as agriculture, industrialization, climate, and biological exchanges. That is as it should be for these are central themes for environmental history. In this volume, you will find regions, themes, and time periods not well represented in the historiography, new evidence for old debates, and inventive new ways of approaching the practice of environmental history.
The Companion is split into four parts. Part I, entitled “Times,” shows how the issues and trajectories of the relationship between society and nature have evolved over time, and how they differ from one period to the next. Authors cover major milestones in human history, helping readers develop a sense of the deep past so often neglected in environmental, and indeed in all, history. Chapters in this section discuss the latest findings in the study of human origins, the methods by which environmental historians and other scholars understand ancient landscapes and how environmental factors contributed to the rise and fall of human societies over time. Because our understanding of the human story is so different from that of a decade ago when the first edition of the Companion appeared, several chapters required significant updates. The scope of this section is vast, and the authors’ work demonstrates how the coevolution of humans and nature over a very longue durée can illuminate not only current environmental issues but also political and economic ones.
The next section, Part II, is entitled “Places,” and it is here that careful readers will see the most significant changes between the first edition of this volume and the second. This part is a series of regional or national narratives and historiographies that show how the pieces of the global puzzle fit together. Place, although it can be defined and construed in many ways and at many scales, is usually a central concept for environmental history. In practice, most environmental history is written about specific places, some as small as a few farms, others as large as a continent. We felt that it is important to include the regional and local, for they are the foundation of the global. Many areas around the world have experienced similar historical processes that drive ecological change – biological invasions, colonialism, industrialization, conservation movements – and this section allows readers to see how geographical variations in climate, terrain, and availability of natural resources, as well as cultural patterns, political frameworks, and economic structures, have influenced the map of environmental change. Not every country or region is represented, but readers will note brand‐new chapters on Africa, China, South Asia, and central Eurasia. In chapters that cover areas of the globe that have rich historiographies, such as the United States, authors have overhauled their work from the original volume to reflect the fast‐growing literature of the last decade. Other chapters, however, have been updated more lightly. The literature on the Soviet Union, for instance, has not seen great change since the first edition was published, but the war in Ukraine will more than likely transform it in the future. The chapters from the first edition that, at the time, represented the first surveys of areas such as the Arctic and the Middle East, remain regions of the globe that have yet to receive their due from environmental historians despite the intervening years.
The third part of the Companion moves away from chronological and geographical organization. Here, each author examines one thematic issue across the globe and across time. There are chapters which outline the human relationship to natural elements, such as forests, rivers, and oceans, as well as chapters on how the evolution of technology, warfare, and industrial processes altered the world’s environment. Authors focus partly on the biogeophysical changes themselves, but also upon the social, economic, and political forces behind them. Some chapters present familiar themes, such as fishing or agriculture, but use an expanded temporal or geographical scope to present readers with new, global perspectives. Other chapters, such as those on grasslands and evolution, challenge readers with unfamiliar comparisons and unfettered imagination. There is a new chapter on European urban environmental history, and substantial updates to chapters on pressing issues such as climate change.
The final section of the Companion, Part IV, surveys different types of environmental thought and action around the world, giving readers a sense of the variety of cultural, intellectual, and political engagements with the environment in modern times. While the first two parts have significant chronological depth, Parts III and IV exhibit a strong bias toward the modern period (since 1500 CE). This is partly a reflection of the current literature in the field and partly due to the practicalities of scholarship in global environmental history. This section contains two new chapters on global environmental governance and environmentalism in Europe, joining the original chapters on environmentalism in the world’s fastest‐growing economies, Brazil and China, and explorations of major themes in environmental thought.
Global environmental history is a fast‐moving field with porous boundaries and a wide range of interdisciplinary connections. The chapters in this volume are by no means comprehensive and do not provide complete coverage of all themes and all places, but the chapters help provide an understanding of how people actually work in environmental history and reflect the major approaches within the field’s scholarship as they have evolved since the first edition. This Companion aims to offer a guide to environmental history scholarship written in, and for, our ecologically dynamic and globalizing times, and we hope that readers continue to find something illuminating and entrancing in its pages.
Notes
1
See for example J. A. Thomas, M. Williams, and J. Zalasiewicz,
The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach
, Cambridge, Polity, 2020.
2
D. Christian,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004; F. Spier,
The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today
, Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Press, 1996; F. Spier,
Big History and the Future of Humanity
, Oxford, Wiley‐Blackwell, 2011.
3
Remarkably the most comprehensive work in this vein as regards the Western world was written over 50 years ago: C. Glacken,
