History conventionally concerns itself with the growth, expansion and death of civilizations and uses a Eurocentric model of development from agriculture to modernity. Challenged for lack of humanity, social historians added local lives of ordinary people. Expansion beyond European regions questioned assumptions, and world history began to emerge. Some 20th century historians decried the absence of environmental consideration. Whether consciously avoided for fear of environmental determinism, or ignored as irrelevant to political and economic analyses, the environment was thought not to be a concern of history. Historical geographers, anthropologists and natural scientists applying time dimensions to their work provided basic texts. Because formal environmental history began in the USA, North American agendas dominated its initial themes and conceptualizations. Seeking to encourage expansions, namely world history into the environment and environmental history into the world, Edmund Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz offer eleven papers collectively named The Environment and World History.
Like its subject(s), the book is heterogeneous. The first section's overview contains Kenneth Pomeranz's thoughts on world history, environmental history, state formation and the ‘developmentalist project’ as frames of analysis. Edmund Burke III then considers the environmental consequences of human history from the perspective of energy consumption. Developing and expanding states (and empires) define ownership and rights to land. John F. Richards organizes his review of state growth around three themes: the displacement or extinction of indigenous peoples and consequent obliteration of localized property-regimes, the erosion of community property rights in agrarian societies and the struggle for stable property rights in urban(izing) spaces. States turn landscapes into property, defining their boundaries as frontiers, and the land beyond as wild, unclaimed or empty. These broad analyses provide a ‘viewing platform’ from which to look at the second section's four regional environmental histories.
Edmund Burke III's long history of the Middle East is based firmly in geographical units, water use and agriculture. His Middle East is bounded by the Iranian plateau and Morocco's desert, rather than Arab-Israeli tensions. Very different landforms (flood plain, dry plateau and desert) produced different human sociopolitical and technical responses, but ultimately all confronted the fundamental limits of water. Kenneth Pomeranz's chapter on China addresses its very long state history's fundamental concerns about environmental management. Three underlying beliefs are identified in all regimes: most people should live in rural areas, central governments should support weaker regions and governments should protect people from destructive environmental events. Marc Cioc's investigates the ultimate expression of Karl Wittfogel's oriental despotism, the Rhine River Commission. Once separated from the purview of the eight nations through which it flows, the Rhine was managed by committee according to ‘economic rationality’, using the most advanced engineering. The result is a case study as close to a controlled experiment as possible, of the relationship between economics and ecocide. Three little discussed South-east Asian river deltas, namely Myanmar's Irrawaddy, Thailand's Chao Phraya and Viet Nam's Mekong, were sites of 19th and 20th century migration and expansion of wet rice culture, stimulated by colonial imperatives and market linkages. Michael Adas reclaims the notion of frontier from its association with American fantasies of wilderness and neo-Europes. The expansion of wet rice culture appeared more benign than that of dry land crops (wheat and maize), since alluvial systems were guided, not entirely disrupted. However, wet rice cultivation has been identified as a significant source of climate-changing methane gas.
The third section of the book orients readers to area-based environmental histories. The condensation of William Beinart's 2000 review essay from African Affairs preserves his categorization of themes in African environmental history and cites publications he considers to be central. The original article provided a richer bibliography (Beinart Reference Beinart2000). In sharp contrast is Mahesh Rangarajan's expansion of his 1996 article from Environment and History (Rangarajan Reference Rangarajan1996). Perhaps the critical literature review seamlessly integrating considerations of state, society, lifeways and environment reflects the fact that many South Asian environmental historians are in some way connected to social movements. The heterogeneity of the subcontinent (flora, fauna, geography and societies) and its long pre-colonial histories of states and empires places British colonialism in context. Sophisticated analysis is required to consider so much diversity over such a long period of time: single-factor analysis collapses in inadequacy. Lisa Sedrez documents the inception and growth of Latin American environmental history as a movement within the field of history and critically reviews themes and approaches. She notes the major contributions of other disciplines, and credits this, and the demand for historical analyses by non-historians, as the source of Latin American environmental historians' characteristic interdisciplinarity. She observes that environmental histories are written at different scales, from local to global, but cannot proceed far in isolation from each other. Douglas R. Weiner's quest to understand how post-Soviet Eurasia's environment became so compromised begins with Slavs living as ‘free people’ in the forests near the Black Sea, and follows the rise and fall of subsequent states and empires. The recurrent themes of war, threat of war and defence provided both justifications for elites' retention of power through enormous extraction from peasants and landscape, and generations of traumatized populations wanting only peace and security. The environment suffered under all regimes, but the Stalin era's declaration of nature as enemy and science as salvation produced an expression of state power through gigantism that took environmental exploitation and destruction to regional scales. This is, perhaps, a fitting last chapter as the 21st century dawns, with growing awareness of the global consequences of gigantic human interventions in landscapes and ecosystem function.
Although constructed to enhance dialogue among historians, some chapters would also inform non-historians interested in the environmental consequences of human life, and provide core reading for those who seek introductions to new geographies and eras. The book also suggests problems confronting historians who would expand their perspectives. Scale should be recognized as a significant factor when determining environmental significance. Evidence was presented, for example, of trade as stimulating both destruction and conservation of extensive land-use systems. Macro or global statements should be shunned without mastery of the underlying local geographies and environmental histories to avoid untenable generalizations. Analyses of states ought to include cultural perspectives, especially if more than one ethnic group is involved. And, finally, quantitative analysis must be approached critically. A graph such as ‘Average daily per capita energy consumption in different historical eras (protohuman – present)’ is incredible, if not humorous. Repeating numbers that have no base in fact, and repeating any numbers stripped of their underlying assumptions, is a disservice to the larger intellectual community. With these cautions, The Environment and World History is recommended as a reference book for libraries, both personal and professional.
