Books in the Studies in Environment and History series

Edmund Russell's much-anticipated new book examines interactions between greyhounds and their owners in England from 1200 to 1900 to make a compelling case that history is an evolutionary process. Five forces - politics, economics, technology, ecology, and culture - consistently shaped greyhounds and their owners, with a radical transition in 1831.

The first detailed analysis of how climate change influenced the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth century. For environmental historians, scholars of Dutch history, and anyone interested in climate change.

What is the source of Norway's culture of environmental harmony in our troubled world? Exploring the role of Norwegian scholar-activists of the late twentieth century, Anker shows how their portrayal of Norway as a pristine natural environment of the periphery led to it being fashioned as an idealised ecological microcosm. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book explores the interplay between war and environment in Henan Province, a hotly contested frontline territory that endured massive environmental destruction and human disruption during the conflict between China and Japan during World War II. In a desperate attempt to block Japan's military advance, Chinese Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek broke the Yellow River's dikes in Henan in June 1938, resulting in devastating floods that persisted until after the war's end. Greater catastrophe struck Henan in 1942-3, when famine took some two million lives and displaced millions more. Focusing on these war-induced disasters and their aftermath, this book conceptualizes the ecology of war in terms of energy flows through and between militaries, societies, and environments. Ultimately, Micah Muscolino argues that efforts to procure and exploit nature's energy in various forms shaped the choices of generals, the fates of communities, and the trajectory of environmental change in North China.

The first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, especially its colonial and global aspects, Green Imperialism highlights the significance of Utopian, physiocratic and medical thinking. For the first time, the limitability of local and global resources could be recognised.

Combining discussion of technology, nature, and warfare, this 2001 book explains the impact of war on nature and vice versa. Using the history of chemical warfare and pest control as a case study, this book helps us understand the development of total war and the rise of the modern environmental movement.

Under Mao, the traditional Chinese ideal of 'harmony between heaven and humans' was abrogated in favor of Mao's insistence that 'people will conquer nature'. Mao and the Chinese Communist Party's 'war' to bend the physical world to human will often had disastrous consequences both for human beings and the natural environment.

Brazil once enjoyed a near monopoly in rubber when the commodity was gathered in the wild. In this innovative study, Warren Dean demonstrates that environmental factors have played a key role in the many failed attempts to produce a significant rubber crop again in Brazil.

Taking as a case study the sixteenth-century history of a region of highland central Mexico, it shows how the environmental and social changes brought about by the introduction of Old World species aided European expansion.

Nature's Economy is a wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past, first published in 1994. It traces the origins of the concept, discusses the thinkers who have shaped it, and shows how it in turn has shaped the modern perception of our place in nature.

This study provides the first comprehensive discussion of conservation in Nazi Germany. Looking at Germany in an international context, it analyses the roots of conservation in the late nineteenth century, the gradual adaptation of racist and nationalist thinking among conservationists in the 1920s and their indifference to the Weimar Republic. It describes how the German conservation movement came to cooperate with the Nazi regime and discusses the ideological and institutional lines between the conservation movement and the Nazis. Uekoetter further examines how the conservation movement struggled to do away with a troublesome past after World War II, making the environmentalists one of the last groups in German society to face up to its Nazi burden. It is a story of ideological convergence, of tactical alliances, of careerism, of implication in crimes against humanity, and of deceit and denial after 1945. It is also a story that offers valuable lessons for today's environmental movement.

Explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans. It historicizes food production and other environmental relations. But class, gender and, later, race determined the food production individuals practised. After the mid-twentieth century, the interventionist state enforced coercive conservation and segregation, undermining most food production by blacks.

The first comprehensive survey of Chinese environmental history. Pioneering essays explore new methodologies of historical environmental research, comparisons of China with the West and Japan, and the impact of the early modern ecological transformation on the spread of disease.

First published in 1999, this is a comparative history of the development of ideas about nature. The book focuses on the importance of native nature in the Anglo settler countries of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, from the development of natural history through the rise of environmentalism.

Robert Harms explores nature and culture in the story of the Nunu, who live in and around the swampy floodplains of the Zaire River. Increasing population impinged upon the limits of available resources in the late eighteenth century, eventually resulting in civil war in the 1960s.

This was the first scholarly history of efforts to reduce the environmental costs of suburban development in the United States. The book offers an account of two of the most important historical events since 1945 - the mass migration to the suburbs and the rise of the environmental movement.

People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But as Alfred W. Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest. European organisms had certain decisive advantages over their New World and Australian counterparts. The spread of European disease, flora and fauna went hand in hand with the growth of populations. Consequently, these imperialists became proprietors of the most important agricultural lands in the world. In the second edition, Crosby revisits his now classic work and again evaluates the global historical importance of European ecological expansion.

A unifying discussion of our increasingly integrated global economy, higher population levels and greater resource demands.

Nature Incorporated explores the Industrial Revolution in New England from an environmental perspective. Focusing on the legendary Waltham-Lowell style mills, this book examines how these textile factories brought water under their exclusive control.

The book represents a significant new departure in the study of ecology and change in human society.

Challenging the conventional wisdom conveyed by Western environmental historians about China, this book examines the correlations between economic and environmental changes in the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi from 1400 to 1850, but also provides substantial background from 2CE on. Robert Marks discusses the impact of population growth on land-use patterns, the agro-ecology of the region, and deforestation; the commercialization of agriculture and its implications for ecological change; the impact of climatic change on agriculture; and the ways in which the human population responded to environmental challenges. This book is a significant contribution to both Chinese and environmental history. It is groundbreaking in its methods and in its findings.