Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (review)

The field of environmental history is gaining better definition year by year, as scholars rooted in many disciplines contribute studies of the interactions between social and ecological change in varied local settings. The strength of this trend makes it difficult for participants in a far-flung, loosely defined discourse to keep abreast of each other’s recent work. Collections like Ecology and Empire are helpful in bringing recent thinking together and indicating where we stand.

This volume’s title is misleading. It does not give fully global coverage of settler societies in modern times; rather, it centers on Australia and looks outward from there to other frontiers of the British Empire in the past two centuries, with additional comparative or global surveys of particular topics. The collection emerged from a project at the Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London, and broadened into participation from other Commonwealth scholars specializing, in particular, on southern Africa. The Commonwealth tradition of historical geography concentrates on showing how the improvisational character of early frontier agricultural economies worked repeatedly from a base of little knowledge of local soil, vegetation, and climate conditions. Several authors in this collection are specialists in the historical archives of British colonies; they bring sophisticated knowledge of the empire’s frontier societies and civil administrations to the discussion.

As European experience of extracting wealth from alien landscapes accumulated, various branches of tropical and subtropical science emerged: agronomy, soil science, veterinary medicine, hydrology, and more. In the second section, “The Empire of Science,” four authors, led by Robin, discuss the ways in which the emergence of ecology and related sciences was shaped by the practical preoccupations of imperial rule. William Beinart, a leading environmental historian of southern Africa, shows how veterinary science developed there primarily in support of colonial livestock ranches. (Shaun Milton’s chapter later in the book shows by extension the environmental impact of this commercial ranching complex—an example of a system that has transformed the ungulate ecology of the planet—on the Transvaal beef frontier.) Robin and several others point up the ways in which the science of modern soil conservation emerged in the early 1900s throughout the arid areas of the English-speaking world in response to the massive soil erosion and degradation caused by the agriculture and stock raising of early settlers.

The theme of nature conservation as an artifact of colonial and settler economies emerges from this discussion. Richard Grove demonstrates how John Croumbie Brown led the movement toward environmentally sound land management in South Africa. Jane Carruthers applies similar perspectives to the founding of South Africa’s great system of national parks and wildlife reserves. Her purpose is not to argue that Kruger and other parks were imposed on local populations by imperial fiat, but to delineate the complex negotiations between governors and local people that determined how the national parks would be managed.

Two outstanding chapters in the section entitled “Economy and Ecology” add broad overviews to the series of local studies around the arid lands of the Commonwealth. Michael Williams’ chapter, “Ecology, Imperialism and Deforestation,” gives a concise introduction to his global perspective; no other author has yet summarized modern global forest transformations so lucidly. This chapter is followed by Elinor G. K. Melville’s “Global Developments and Latin American Environments,” which demonstrates how the full process of ecological disruptions in modern times has resulted not only from the European intrusion, but also from the labor of indigenous cultures in their multi-crop agricultural and forest extraction systems.

In one of the final chapters, John MacKenzie provides a lucid overview of three schools of environmental history writing. The first is concerned with the prospect of a global apocalypse triggered by European expansion, and the second with the long-term ramifications of European colonialism, as well as that of other imperial systems, such as traditional China. McKenzie also describes a third trend that he labels the Fully...