Empire-making and environmental change are interconnected.
Empires in world history controlled and exploited animal, human, plant, and mineral resources to expand and consolidate power, often at other polities' expense. Factors like technological know-how and innovation, improved transportation and military might, as well as plant- and animal-breeding, enhanced an empire's ability to exploit environments.
Conversely, environmental factors could contribute to imperial decline—through climate change, flooding, or unforeseen environmental feedbacks, the last often resulting from resource overexploitation. This chapter uses environmental history to explore that relationship.We begin by defining environmental history and reviewing some of the most influential approaches to world empires and environment. We divide our case studies into four main periods, defined by major changes in world environmental history, relying mainly on secondary sources while drawing also on our own expertise in early (Gene) and modern (James) world environmental history.
Our chapter emphasizes the entanglement of world empires in what are still often inaccurately referred to as “natural” and “human” processes. Even in obviously natural processes—such as pre-1880s periods of climatic cooling and warming— humans often interposed themselves as arbiters between Heaven and Earth (as in China), or viewed in their own behavior explanations of divinely driven environmental events (floods, drought, plague).1
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