Frames and Perspectives

Moving “between global space and local place, between nature and society,”² envi­ronmental historians use scientific and archival evidence to explore human-nature interactions over time.

¹ Elvin 1998; Endfield and Nash 2002; Beattie et al. 2014a.

² Griffiths 2000.

³ Bowler 1992; Anker 2001.

James Beattie and Eugene Anderson, Ecology In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0014. change.^[1119] Empires were founded on the exploitation and manipulation of particular ecosystems.

Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986) offer some of the earliest and most influential approaches deploying ecological explanations in world history. For Crosby, ecology helped to explain European imperialism's success in the Americas and Australasia—“neo-Europes” whose climates and other environmental aspects resembled those of the settlers' homes. In Crosby's formulation, Old World plants, animals, and diseases outcompeted those of the New World. Disease debilitated native populations. Hooved animals trampled their way across continents; and introduced grasses outcompeted indigenous ones. Working in concert, these processes significantly aided and inflected European imperialism.^[1120]

Since Crosby, many other approaches to world empires and environment have appeared. Alf Hornborg (Chapter 13 in this volume) fuses world-systems theory and ecology to explain global inequality. Other historians have traced energy transfers or metabolism, in both urban and rural settings,^[1121] or have used different frameworks, such as eco-ambiguity or environmental anxiety, to explain the dis­juncture between environmental attitudes and behaviors.^[1122] Writers give attention to climatic or geographical processes in imperialism, although some popular studies (usually by non-historians) can present environmental deterministic arguments.^[1123] Historians of world empires and environmental change also study disease histories,^[1124] drawing insights from related disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, political ecology, and historical geography, as well as subjects like histories of food, commodities, and gardens.

The richness and variety of approaches to environmental history and empire are staggering.

Despite such richness, a number of periods and topics beg further inquiry. Work on empire and environment commonly focuses on the post-1500 period; more scholarship is needed on earlier world empires and environmental change (hence our approach). Garden history and environmental history—as we show—offer rich pickings for environmental historians examining world empires,^[1135] yet have not been fully developed. Nor has urban environmental history.^[1136] We also require greater comparisons between different world empires and environmental change.^[1137] And, in studies of world empires and environment just as much as in global en­vironmental history, the challenge remains of integrating material and cultural analyses of change.^[1138]

Our chapter demonstrates how control of natural resources laid the basis for, but also shaped, different world empires. Competition over natural resources, and their more efficient exploitation, spread, and improvement, drove imperial expansions over millennia, just as environmental degradation and disease sometimes acted as brakes on expansion. Attitudes toward natural resources also underwent change through the commodification of resources, a process which has accelerated over the last two hundred years.^[1139]