The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia edited by Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damodaran, and Rohan D’Souza, and: Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 by James Beattie (review)

What are the legacies of the British Empire for the world’s environment? Answering such a question clearly requires the tools of both imperial history and environmental history. The first is a long-established mode of inquiry, the second fairly new; but they are grafting onto one another more firmly now than ever. These two books signal a high moment in environmental histories of the British Empire, started perhaps in the 1990s by Richard H. Grove’s work, and by Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin’s landmark Ecology and Empire (1998). Grove, author of Green Imperialism (1996), is the scholar-in-common here, the historians’ historian who features in both the edited collection and the monograph under review. His photo graces the frontispiece of The British Empire and the Natural World, a volume dedicated warmly to him. For James Beattie, Grove’s work on forestry, on Scottish agricultural improvers and medical doctors, and on South Asia generally all serve as foundational work to be extended, expanded, and re-interpreted in Empire and Environmental Anxiety. Few historians function as this kind of touchstone, to change metaphors. Both books are testament to his influence.

The introduction to The British Empire and the Natural World is definitely worth reading. It revises standard accounts of British imperial history and shows the ways in which the British Empire provided ways of thinking about environmental history on a global scale. The editors and authors are especially interested in global changes over the nineteenth century. This is where scholars of the Victorian period and environmental historians often share ground. Although the mid-twentieth century is often nominated as the marker of real global change, population growth (not least British) in concert with colonial expansion and vast efforts toward agricultural improvement mark the Victorian age and the Victorian world as the initial great acceleration.

There is much here for readers of Victorian history and culture. Aparna Vaidik offers some nineteenth-century British views of the “wild” Andaman islands, a reading of islands very different from Grove’s “tropical island Edens.” Daniel Rycroft explores 1850s British India through the work of Walter Sherwill, an East India Company surveyor and geologist; Deborah Sutton examines forests in south India from the 1830s onward. Christopher V. Hill investigates the Royal Indian Engineering College at Coopers’ Hill, one important late manifestation of utilitarianism. Jayeeta Sharma explores tea plantation economies introduced into Assam in the nineteenth century, while B. Eswara Rao and Praveen Singh consider irrigation plans. These chapters and others do justice to the field of environmental history, foregrounding resource use and extraction and thereby connections to economic history, histories of technology, and the history of ideas.

The British Empire and the Natural World covers several centuries, arguing for an exceptional moment between the 1600s and the 1960s. But it does focus strongly on the nineteenth century. Beattie’s Empire and Environmental Anxiety studies the long nineteenth century from 1800 to the 1920s. His book works off, and from, an idea of “environmental anxiety,” which he defines as “concerns generated when environments did not conform to European preconceptions about their natural productivity or when colonisation set in motion a series of unintended environmental consequences” (1). These anxieties prompted responses, including measures that were remedial to the environment, or sought to be. Thus Beattie is less interested in writing a catastrophic environmental history than rendering more complex the history of conservation, itself located within colonial endeavours. Put another way, he argues that conservation was itself...