The book under review follows hot on the heels of the author’s The polar regions: an environmental history (Howkins, Reference Howkins2015). The polar regions are excellent places for ‘doing environmental history’, as their strangeness offers new perspectives on familiar subjects. Although rarely presented as such, histories of exploration often provide case studies of how human activities interact with the material environment, which is at the heart of environmental history. The polar regions also provide striking instances of political power, or rather of imperialism, where notions of ‘improvement’ are used to legitimize policies of occupation and control. The author’s reliance, in Polar Regions, largely upon published sources suffices for the general approach adopted, illustrated by case studies. It constitutes a valuable addition to the already extensive literature on polar history and environmental history generally.

The author continues, in Frozen Empires, to develop the notion of ‘environmental authority’, which in the Arctic often took the form of ‘improvement’ to the lives of the indigenous population, and in the Antarctic has frequently been imposed ‘for the good of humanity’, whether through the attempted control of whaling or latterly the scientific knowledge gained of anthropogenic climate change. Focused on the Antarctic Peninsula, there are chapters on the imperial environment, environmental nationalism, and the environmental history of decolonization. Later chapters cover Perón’s Antarctic Dream, Antarctic détente, preserving power, and the prospect of ‘melting empires’. Together, they endeavour to show how a seemingly worthless and hostile environment became so contested. The greater part of the book is focused accordingly on how the British Government sought to legitimize its ownership of the Peninsula through survey and research, and how the Argentine and Chilean Governments responded in their rival claims based on geographical proximity and geological continuity. Far from the Antarctic Treaty instigating genuine decolonization, Howkins contends it has perpetuated those imperial assertions through reformulation. The Antarctic’s ‘frozen empires’ remain in place.

Of the many authors of the environmental histories cited by Howkins, the omission of Chris Smout (the founder of the Institute of Environmental History at the author’s alma mater, the Scottish University of St Andrews) is surprising. His writings remain among the most distinguished in exemplifying the value of evidence-based environmental history. Howkins’ earlier doctorate, which also has the title Frozen Empires, was published by ProQuest LLC for the University of Texas at Austin in Reference Howkins2008. It was particularly significant for its systematic use of the South American, as well as British, archives in reconstructing the long-standing territorial dispute between Argentina, Britain and Chile over what they variously called Antártida Argentina, the Falkland Islands Dependencies and Antártica Chilena. Now, some ten years later, in the present book, Howkins lets one forceful critique tumble after another in recounting the pretensions of politicians and their officials, governors and ambassadors, and of ‘expert’ opinion generally. The reader will, however, look largely in vain for the archival evidence to support what those largely unidentified individuals and organs of government are alleged to have determined. Whereas historians were justifiably concerned, when the twentieth-century archives were first opened up, that they would become over-reliant upon them, Howkins makes scarcely any systematic or detailed use of them. This is all the more surprising in the British case. The National Archives are one of the very few British institutions that gets better and better. Not even a digital camera is required to check out and use the relevant Cabinet material as it is online.

Confidence in the author’s bold assertions of what he perceives to have motivated the respective Governments is hardly bolstered by the numerous errors of fact and interpretation, in terms of the evidence now available. The Colonial Office records would have informed him, for example, that the adoption of lines of longitude to delimit the British Letters Patent of 1917 had nothing to do with the kind of sectoral division adopted in parts of the Arctic. The Foreign Office records would have emphasized the pivotal role played by the Legal Advisers, not in the furtherance of some kind of aggressive territorialism, as Howkins implies generally of British policy, but in response to what they, and those acting for other governments, saw as the requirements of international law. In that respect, reference to Andrew Fitzmaurice’s Sovereignty, property and empire (Reference Fitzmaurice2014) would have proved considerably more relevant than a good number of the published works cited. Closer reference to the data sources might have suggested that the Governor’s endeavour to maintain the productivity of the emerging Southern whaling industry in the early 1900s drew not so much upon ‘the propagation of a “declensionist narrative” of early nineteenth-century sealing’, but the need to avoid the kind of economic loss to the Southern Ocean suffered by the perceived exhaustion of the Northern whale stocks.