Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies ed. by Christina Folke Ax et al. (review)

Cultivating the Colonies is a recent addition to the rich body of literature on the interactions of colonial states with the environment. It explores the theoretical as well as the practical aspects of "the relationship between power and nature" and the "nature of power," and it covers various environmental issues through case studies that range in time from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. Instead of providing an "easy" answer on the nature of colonialism, the authors shed light on both the destructive and conservationist aspects of colonial states. Taken together, the chapters cover a vast geographical expanse. From Russian Siberia to German Africa to British India to Louisiana, each case study demonstrates either elements of "continuities" or instances of "departures" that shaped the history of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial attitudes toward nature.

To give coherence to a book with a vast spatial, topical, and temporal scope, it is thematically organized into three parts, starting with how the metropolitan states perceived the environment of the colonies, followed by an analysis of how they sought to manage it, and ending with a discussion of the legacies inherited and continued by the postcolonial states. All three sections contain essays that support and ones that challenge the notion that colonial states had a deep and profoundly destructive effect on the environment. For instance, Phia Steyn's work on Basuto food consumption falls in the latter category, as does Elizabeth Lustrum's work on Massingir Dam in southern Mozambique and Joseph Hodge's on British colonial experts' role in the perpetuation of certain environmental ideas and practices across the colonial-postcolonial divide. These authors saw "little difference between a colonial use of power and how other states exercised their will." In the cases they studied, no specific environmental practices looked particularly unique to colonialism; the colonizers continued with the strategies and mechanisms of precolonial times, as these were found to be perfectly suitable for managing both environmental resources and hazards.

Other contributors, however, argue that the colonial and modern states were "similar but not equivalent" to each other. These authors describe how economic and social-cultural requirements prompted the metropolitan states to transfer their own approaches to the environment on a global scale. The scale and nature of the new projects in the colonies required new mechanisms and strategies, which were not met simply by co-opting the existing ones. In his comparative study of four river deltas, in the United States, China, India, and West Africa, Christopher Morris points out how the colonists acted on the landscapes in recognizing their commercial possibilities; they carried their experience from one deltaic region to another ecologically similar one. Andrew Wear remarked on the "europeanization" of the local environment in the colonies. The hill stations of Darjeeling and Simla bore little similarity to precolonial Indian towns; the two stations were more like the hometowns that the foreigners had left behind.

Some essays go beyond the debate over the similarity-dissimilarity divide to explore other aspects of "nature of power." For instance, in his work on meteorological sciences in the Philippines, Greg Bankoff reflects on how differences between the northern and the southern European scientific traditions shaped the perception of one state (America) by another (Spain). In her study of the role of indigenous medical practitioners in the outbreak of plague in urban Punjab, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan sees little evidence of "homogenously hostile reaction" on the part of the healers to colonial intervention in the health matter of the natives; the latter, rather, acted as a conduit between the state and its subjects. David Biggs studies how evidences from aerial photography backed up orientalist perceptions of human nature and contributed to the classification of peasants as either "lazy" or "heroes."

Scholars of environmental history would benefit from reading this lucidly written book, especially because it discusses diverse cases and has useful references to...