Environment and empire offers a wide-ranging synthetic overview of British imperial attempts to control and regulate nature in its colonial venues around the globe. It examines some of the many ways in which British colonial policies directly and indirectly transformed, and in some cases obliterated, local landscapes, ecologies, and indigenous human populations, as well as native flora and fauna. The book opens with an eclectic set of case studies that illuminate how these changes were manifested in different regions and periods as British colonizers commodified natural resources (such as timber, large game, rubber, oil, and water), established new urban administrative centres, developed extensive plantation agriculture and colonial infrastructure, and sought to control land use and access to vital natural resources. Case studies focus on the British West Indies and North America (exclusive of the United States) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as Africa, India, and Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several chapters offer a comparative, trans-regional analysis of the environmental impacts as people and ideas migrated and cross-fertilized throughout the empire.

While considering a diverse array of environmental factors, the book avoids an overly deterministic approach, never losing sight of the significance of human actions. One of its key themes is that British colonial endeavours often precipitated unintended consequences. Diseases, unwittingly transmitted by early colonizers, decimated indigenous Caribbean populations. Planters transformed ecologically diverse West Indian islands into vast sugar plantations, causing extensive deforestation and exacerbating drought and erosion. In North America, hunters pursued beavers to near-extinction to meet metropolitan demand for furs. The global transfer of flora and fauna, meanwhile, displaced valuable indigenous species. The book is unusually even-handed, however, in considering both positive and negative environmental impacts of British imperialism. In Egypt, for example, the British constructed irrigation systems that initially increased local food supplies but ultimately undermined the region's fertility by disrupting seasonal floods that renewed the soil.

Building on Richard Grove's seminal Green imperialism (1995), the authors investigate how early conservation initiatives influenced colonial policies. In the face of population pressure and over-exploitation, some imperial officials sought to manage natural resources and environments more sustainably, based on the assumption that they could make more rational choices than the local populace. Such state efforts to regulate natural resources often met with resistance from indigenous populations whose subsistence activities – whether gathering fuel in India's forests or hunting on African wildlife preserves – were criminalized or circumscribed.

The book avoids the tendency to depict colonial officials as interchangeable parts of a faceless, monolithic bureaucracy. Instead, we learn how colonial administrators, military men, scientists, and engineers, transferred from one posting within the empire to another, gained experience and knowledge which they adapted to new situations. Urban planning, for example, was deeply influenced by lessons in disease control and sanitation gleaned in older colonial cities. While many colonial authorities merely implemented centralized imperial policies, even at times those ill-suited to local conditions, others voiced critical, even subversive, opinions, challenging the conventional wisdom about environmental management. Likewise, the book includes the stories of indigenous persons, many of whom were forced to labour in support of the empire, who regarded all colonial policies, whatever their intent, as forms of exploitation to be resisted. As British influence waned, indigenous persons – from Inuits in Canada to Maoris in New Zealand – sought to reassert their rights over the disposition and management of native lands and natural resources.

The book incorporates an impressive bibliography, including classic works of environmental history, important post-colonial revisionist texts, and influential new scholarship. While ambitious in its geographical and chronological scope and its diverse, interdisciplinary subject matter, the book lacks coherence as a unified whole, although the authors strive to highlight common themes throughout. (As a teaching resource, the resulting sampler effect offers some advantages. The chapter on the British Caribbean – an excellent, yet brief, synopsis of the environmental impact of plantations – could serve very well as a student reading. Other sections, such as the chapters on disease and urban design, also work very well together as interpretive units.) Nevertheless, Environment and empire offers readers an engaging, well-nuanced, and unusually circumspect introduction to the environmental history of the British empire that includes many fascinating and colourful details. While never losing sight of ‘the asymmetries of power which were the hallmarks of empire’, the authors offer some thought-provoking insights into the tensions inherent in the ‘linked themes of exploitation and conservation’, a subject that remains in the forefront of the on-going intellectual debates that continue to shape this emerging field.