Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

Acknowledgments

xiii Acknowledgments Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies is a selection of papers presented in a conference held in one of the global centers of power (as least as far as environmental history is concerned): the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. We would like to thank the Institute for support, and especially its former director, Christof Mauch, who promoted the study of environmental history in multitudinous ways and with conferences too numerous to mention during his years there. The staff at the GHI-DC, especially Christa Brown, Bärbel Thomas, Sabine Fix, and Christoph Bottin, made sure all the travel and technology for our conference ran as smoothly as it always did in the Mauch era. We also thank the present GHI-DC director, Hartmut Berghoff, for continuing to support the environmental history series. Phillipp Gassert, the former deputy director of the GHI-DC, assisted us in bringing the volume to the Ohio University Press. We also appreciated the chance to work with Mary Tonkinson, the former environmental history editor at the Institute, who suggested the present organization of Cultivating the Colonies. To the contributing authors, we have the greatest debt: without their participation at the conference, their stimulating discussions, and the quality of their ultimate articles, we would not have a book. At Ohio University Press, we thank Gillian Berchowitz, the series editor, for assisting us in shaping the book into its final form, especially the introduction. Beth Pratt, the production manager, steered the book  | Acknowledgments efficiently through the production process, with the help of Charles Sutherland and Deborah Wiseman, the copy editor. We also acknowledge the History Department at Towson University and its chairperson , Robert Rook, for financial assistance for the cover of Cultivating the Colonies. After three days of stimulating discussion in Washington, Richard Grove offered the final comments at our conference. As was so typical of Richard, many of the single remarks that he made about individual papers was the seed of an idea for how the chronological and geographical spread of these essays could best be seen in comparative and analytical perspective, and we referred back to his insights many times during the preparation of this volume. Our final thanks—and the dedication of this volume—goes to Richard for his participation in the conference and for his work that continuously inspires new contributions to environmental history. ...