• List of Illustrations Preface by Edmund Burke III Acknowledgments Introduction. Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East History, Policy, Power, and Practice Diana K. Davis
• 1. "A Rebellion of Technology" Development, Policing, and the British Arabian Imaginary Priya Satia
• 2. Restoring Roman Nature French Identity and North African Environmental History Diana K. Davis
• 3. Body of Work Water and Reimagining the Sahara in the Era of Decolonization George R. Trumbull IV
• 4. From the Bottom UpThe Nile, Silt, and Humans in Ottoman Egypt Alan Mikhail
• 5. Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt The 1902 Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography Jennifer L. Derr
• 6. Remapping the Nation, Critiquing the State Environmental Narratives and Desert Land Reclamation in Egypt Jeannie Sowers
• 7. Salts, Soils, and (Un)Sustainabilities? Analyzing Narratives of Environmental Change in Southeastern Turkey Leila M. Harris
• 8. Hydro-Imaginaries and the Construction of the Political Geography of the Jordan River The Johnston Mission, 1953-56 Samer Alatout
• 9. Environmentalism Deferred Nationalisms and Israeli/Palestinian Imaginaries Shaul Cohen Afterword Timothy Mitchell Contributors Index.
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The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production. Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George R. Trumbull IV.
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• 1. Introduction
• 2. Environmental Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade and CaribbeanPlantations
• 3. The Fur Trade in Canada
• 4. Hunting, Wildlife, and Imperialism in Southern Africa
• 5. Imperial Travellers
• 6. Sheep, Pastures, and Demography in Australia
• 7. Forests and Forestry in India
• 8. Water, Irrigation, and Agrarian Society in India and Egypt
• 9. Colonial Cities: Environment, Space, and Race
• 10. Plague and Urban Environments
• 11. Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis in East and Central Africa
• 12. Imperial Scientists, Ecology, and Conservation
• 13. Empire and the Visual Representation of Nature
• 14. Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia
• 15. Oil Extraction in the Middle East: the Kuwait Experience
• 16. Resistance to Colonial Conservation and Resource Management
• 17. National Parks and the Growth of Tourism
• 18. The Post-Imperial Urban Environment
• 19. Reassertion of Indigenous Environmental Rights and Knowledge.
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European imperialism was extraordinarily far-reaching: a key global historical process of the last 500 years. It locked disparate human societies together over a wider area than any previous imperial expansion; it underpinned the repopulation of the Americas and Australasia; it was the precursor of globalization as we now understand it. Imperialism was inseparable from the history of global environmental change. Metropolitan countries sought raw materials of all kinds, from timber and furs to rubber and oil. They established sugar plantations that transformed island ecologies. Settlers introduced new methods of farming and displaced indigenous peoples. Colonial cities, many of which became great conurbations, fundamentally changed relationships between people and nature. Consumer cultures, the internal combustion engine, and pollution are now ubiquitous. Environmental history deals with the reciprocal interaction between people and other elements in the natural world, and this book illustrates the diverse environmental themes in the history of empire. Initially concentrating on the material factors that shaped empire and environmental change, Environment and Empire discusses the way in which British consumers and manufacturers sucked in resources that were gathered, hunted, fished, mined, and farmed. Yet it is also clear that British settler and colonial states sought to regulate the use of natural resources as well as commodify them. Conservation aimed to preserve resources by exclusion, as in wildlife parks and forests, and to guarantee efficient use of soil and water. Exploring these linked themes of exploitation and conservation, this study concludes with a focus on political reassertions by colonised peoples over natural resources. In a post-imperial age, they have found a new voice, reformulating ideas about nature, landscape, and heritage and challenging, at a local and global level, views of who has the right to regulate nature.
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• Early beginnings 500,000-35,000 years ago / Clive Gamble
• Homo sapiens peopling of Europe / Paul Mellars ; Comment : End of story? / Andrew Sherratt
• Coming of agriculture : people, landscapes, and change c.4000-1500 BC / Alasdair Whittle ; Comment : Significant transitions / Colin Renfrew
• Tribes and empires c.1500 BC-AD 500 / Barry Cunliffe ; Comment : Questions of identities / Martin Millett
• Kings and warriors : population and landscape from post-Roman to Norman Britain / Heinrich Härke
• Plagues and peoples : the long demographic cycle, 1250-1670 / Richard Smith ; Comment : Perceptions and people / Paul Slack
• Country and town : the primary, secondary, and tertiary peopling of England in the early modern period / E.A. Wrigley ; Comment : Prometheus prostrated? / John Langton
• Empire, the economy, and immigration : Britain 1850-2000 / Ceri Peach.

This volume reviews the way in which, over the centuries, the evolving human presence in Britain has shaped the British landscape and how, in turn, the British landscape has moulded the development of British communities. From the beginnings of human settlement Britain has represented a final frontier for successive waves of colonists, each bringing its own set of cultural adaptations and its own ethos into the landscape. Over time both landscape and culture have matured from raw frontier to settled centre, moulded by the advent of agriculture, towns, and industry, and by streams of migration both within Britain and from outside. The chapters in this book - by archaeologists, historians, and geographers - present an interdisciplinary and accessible account of that long process. Together they trace the various phases of the story, showing how much of it has only recently been unearthed, and how much remains to be discovered.

• Introduction
• Hunter-gatherers and fisherfolk: 10,000 to 5000 BP
• Shafts of light: agriculturalists
• Closed and open systems, AD 550 to AD 1700
• Building Jerusalem: the Eighteenth Century
• Industrial growth: material empires, 1800-1914
• 'A fit country for heroes', 1914-50
• A post-industrial world, 1950 to the present
• Experience and meaning
• Appendix 1: The changing environment from the air.

This is a history of the environment of England, Wales and Scotland, and of the interactions of people, place and nature since the last ice sheet withdrew some ten thousand years ago. It is concerned with the changing cultures (in the full anthropological sense) of the peoples inhabiting Britain as well as with the environment they transformed, exploited, abused and cherished. As the author points out, every culture in Britain has had to acknowledge its placement on a set of islands 50 N where any month of the year can be the wettest month of the year, where there are some long shallow estuaries and a few deep inlets, and where cereals do not reliably ripen 300 metres above sea-level. Cultural imagination cannot alter these realities, but it can variously view them as dangerous or picturesque, as economic or uneconomic. The book is a history of changing reflexivity in the interactions between people, culture, and nature.The book is structured as a chronological narrative. It is written with unusual.
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This is a history of the environment of England, Wales and Scotland, and of the interactions of people, place and nature since the last ice sheet withdrew some ten thousand years ago. It is concerned with the changing cultures (in the full anthropological sense) of the peoples inhabiting Britain as well as with the environment they transformed, exploited, abused and cherished. As the author points out, every culture in Britain has had to acknowledge its placement on a set of islands 50 N where any month of the year can be the wettest month of the year, where there are some long shallow estuaries and a few deep inlets, and where cereals do not reliably ripen 300 metres above sea-level. Cultural imagination cannot alter these realities, but it can variously view them as dangerous or picturesque, as economic or uneconomic. The book is a history of changing reflexivity in the interactions between people, culture, and nature. The book is structured as a chronological narrative. It is written with unusual grace, wit and clarity, and illustrated with 50 photographs and some 60 maps and diagrams, all specially prepared for this book. The author draws on a very wide range of sources and uses scientific evidence as well as the conventional historical record, as well as on his own experience of the landscapes of Britain. This is cultural and natural history at its best, with a wide appeal within and without the academy.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Introduction From Social Psychology to Imperial Ecology General Smuts&#39--s Politics of Holism and Patronage of Ecology The Oxford School of Imperial Ecology Holism and the Ecosystem Controversy The Politics of Holism, Ecology, and Human Rights Planning a New Human Ecology Conclusion: A World without History An Ecology of Ecologists Notes Sources Index.
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From 1895 to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Peder Anker asks why ecology expanded so rapidly and how a handful of influential scientists and politicians established a tripartite ecology of nature, knowledge, and society. Patrons in the northern and southern extremes of the Empire, he argues, urgently needed tools for understanding environmental history as well as human relations to nature and society in order to set policies for the management of natural resources and to effect social control of natives and white settlement. Holists such as Jan Christian Smuts and mechanists such as Arthur George Tansley vied for the right to control and carry out ecological research throughout the British Empire and to lay a foundation of economic and social policy that extended from Spitsbergen to Cape Town. The enlargement of the field from botany to human ecology required a broader methodological base, and ecologists drew especially on psychology and economy. They incorporated those methodologies and created a new ecological order for environmental, economic, and social management of the Empire.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)