Environmental History Archives - Page 2 of 3

Cotton, Coal, and Capitalism: Review of Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation and On Barak’s Powering Empire

Scholars of the modern Middle East have long identified the region’s integration into the global economy as one of the most dramatic processes of the nineteenth century. Two recent studies – Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism and On Barak’s Powering Empire: how Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization, draw on this tradition and push us beyond the traditional economic narrative to consider some wider cultural contexts. While different in scope, scale, and methodological choices, combining the two books together prompts readers to think more broadly about both the Middle East and the historical moment of the nineteenth century.

Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism

Powering Empire: how Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization

Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation is a detailed study of the materiality of British colonialism in Egypt between 1882 and 1914. The book frames the British colonial project as one driven by economism – the assumption that certain societies are predestined to operate according to distinctive economic logic. Contrary to past narratives of modern Egypt that centered around large landowners, Jakes places the Egyptian peasant (fellah) as the main protagonist of the colonial story. British officials imagined the fellah as an economic actor that, while motivated by the pursuit of greater profits, remained inherently incapable of grasping the logic of the modern liberal economy. Materially, the logic of colonial economism unfolded in the creation of various financial institutions designed to support the individual fellah. This logic not only limited Egypt’s economic growth but also served as proof to the British that Egypt needed the occupation to move toward modernity. Needless to say, in the eyes of British officials, Egyptian modernity was ambiguously defined as it was inherently unreachable.

Jakes narrative concentrates on the Egyptian case to make a broader argument about capitalism. Unlike Jakes, On Barak’s Powering Empire stretches across and beyond the region and begins with an intriguing proposition: to understand our hyper-carbonized moment and begin imagining a carbon-neutral future, Barak suggests studying how fossil fuels – and especially coal – became a global commodity. Contrary to common narratives that focus on Europe, and especially Britain, as the epicenter of the rapid carbonization of the nineteenth century, Barak suggests the Ottoman empire as the space in which coal became widely consumed, traded, and utilized to various needs. Barak urges the readers to think about coal, and fossil energy more broadly, as one crucial element in a complex historical and cultural context. Coal was the driving force behind vast social changes. It allowed cooling systems that enabled better storage of meat and raised meat consumption popularity; it made trains faster and more common, changing in the process how people in the region moved; and it helped pump water and allowed new irrigation methods that transformed local agricultural techniques. Coal, in short, became popular because it was mobile, cheap, and efficient. Unfortunately, we all breath the results of this efficiency to this day.

While different in geographical focus, these two thought-provoking works complement each other while opening up important debates. One such contribution is their emphasis on the importance of the Middle East region to some of the global processes of the nineteenth century. Barak, for example, draws on Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence to argue for the region’s importance as a bridge between Europe and Asia (p. 9-10). Jakes, for his part, suggests Egypt’s cotton market as another case study with which to rethink the spread and perseverance of capitalism. Bringing together the rich historiography that evolved around cotton production in Egypt with new studies of capitalism and nature, Jakes uses hyper-local developments such as irrigation systems and credit institutions to support Jason Moore’s call to see capitalism as a “way of organizing nature” (p. 12-13).

Men, moving from smaller boats, add coal to a steamship in Port Said, Egypt — *Men add coal to a steamship in Port Said, Egypt, circa 1900. Source: Library of Congress*

Emphasizing the significance of the region to the global transformation of the nineteenth century, both scholars contribute to the decolonization of two contemporary conversations. Jakes’ work is highly influenced by the new history of capitalism – a relatively fresh interpretational framework that asks to rethink capitalism beyond traditional Marxist traditions. This new field usually revolves around the American capitalist experience, and as such is organized around challenging old perceptions regarding, among else, capitalism’s connection to slavery, American exceptionalism, and westward expansion. Jakes, for his part, uses the field’s preoccupation with financial institutions and commodities to place the Egyptian case not in comparison to the US but rather to India, where many of his colonial protagonists began their careers. This is a promising move that will potentially contribute not only to the inclusion of nonwestern case studies in this new tradition but also bring the latter into conversation with Middle East studies.

Similar to Jakes’ aspirational project, Barak clearly states that one of the main goals of his book is to rethink the European origins of energy history, or, in his words, to “provincialize thermodynamics” (p. 229). To do so, Barak offers some impressive geographical maneuvers: first, he situates Europe not at the center of his argument, but rather almost at the periphery of the greater drama of energy production and consumption that took over the Middle East. He elegantly intertwines large scale spatial changes in trade and commerce roots with micro-changes in urban development and coal-mine structures. In doing so, he reveals an interconnected world that exists outside of and independently from Europe. This is not to say that Barak neglects the global in favor of the local. On the contrary, transregional connections enable his narrative to move forward. For example, he takes on Timothy Mitchell’s now-famous argument about the positive correlation between fossil energy and democratic organizations, what Mitchell calls “carbon democracy.” Barak, on the other hand, stress how workers’ rights in Europe were achieved “on the backs of colonial workers” (p. 115), thus proving that carbon democracy in one place remains desperately dependent on the existence of carbon autocracy elsewhere.

Finally, both works’ unconventional intervention in commodity history makes them appealing to readers outside the narrow field of Middle East scholars. While both examine two of the most “popular” commodities of the region – cotton and fossil fuel – they successfully created narratives that places these two commodities in a deep cultural context rather than the “traditional” economic-oriented analysis. Some may argue that the authors often overlook the material qualities of these commodities. However, I see their attitudes as an opportunity for scholars to rethink their commodity-driven narratives. Barak, traces how the expansion of the coal trade and increased consumption habits altered the everyday lives of local communities. In his discussion of meat consumption and meat’s political role (chapter 2), he urges the readers to think about meat not only as a commodity or a cultural artifact but also as an energy source. Through this intervention, he helps bring food history and energy history to the same table in what is a promising conceptual novelty.

A man stands in a cotton field. — *Field of Egyptian cotton ready for harvest. Source: Library of Congress*

Similarly, Jakes leans on a rich historiographical tradition that underlines the importance of cotton cultivation to economic growth in nineteenth-century Egypt and links it with new conversations. His elaborate discussion about cotton (chapters 3 and 7) explores the commodification of land and the fight against the cotton-leaf worm and connects the debate about cotton to larger conversations about legal reforms, agronomy, expertise, and environment. While some environmental historians might criticize him for not delving more deeply into the complexities of the nature/culture dichotomy and the environmental consequences of expanding cotton production, other works address this issue. I direct readers especially to Jenifer Derr’s The Live Nile (2019), which can be read as a complementary work. In any case, they (and others) will appreciate Jakes’ impressive empirical achievements in documenting changing land tenures and credit systems.

What makes these works noteworthy is their ability to talk to a wide range of readers and be interesting and deep at the same time. Scholars of the modern Middle East will surely benefit from their empirical richness and from their unique contribution to rethinking the geography of the region. At the same time, readers from outside of the field will find two fascinating, accessible, and inspiring works. Their conceptual innovation and contribution will make them staple readings for environmental historians, historians of science and technology, and curious readers.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (1997) by Christopher Sellers

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson pioneered the public discussion of the dangers of toxic substances present in the environment as a result of industrial activity. Christopher C. Sellers investigates the type of scientific knowledge about toxic substances that Rachel Carson built upon and popularized in this famous study. The book follows the development of industrial work-related illnesses from the 1890s through the early 1950s. First understood as “bodily idiosyncrasies” (28) that were outside the main concern of employers, or that should be endured by masculine workers, knowledge about occupational disease underwent significant transformations over the course of the early 20^th century.

Cover of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science

Sellers’ work is tightly woven and tracks multiple factors that contributed to the development of environmental health science. First, his work follows a series of key studies across the American industrial landscape: phosphorus poisoning from match factories, lead poisoning from a number of industries, silicosis from mining, radium poisoning from watch-making, and others. These demonstrate the slow development of the objects of study for this field. His study also traces changes in who had the expertise and authority to comment on the underlying causes of the illnesses, who should bear the brunt of these diseases, and the impact that this kind of medical science had for both industry, the medical profession, the state, and the lives of workers. Among the many scientists that Sellers writes into the history of environmental health science, Alice Hamilton stands out as a key advocate for the social (and political) purpose of the field and its development. Her work is important even if other contemporary physicians (such as David Edsall at the Harvard Division of Industrial Hygiene) overlooked it because it did not meet their standards for depoliticized science.

Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), an expert in occupational health issues, was Assistant Professor of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Hamilton did additional research in Germany and then began a lifelong effort to apply bacteriology, pharmacology, and toxicology to public health. Source: Acc. 90-105 – Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s, Smithsonian Institution Archives

The scope of the book is clearly-defined and the chapter sequence is well-structured. Sellers frames the presentation of his research with a question containing an easy touchstone for anyone interested in environmental humanities and environmentalism: where did Rachel Carson’s knowledge of toxins come from? Sellers starts his narrative with the 1893 Chicago exhibition, by drawing our attention to the lead that was present in much of its white paint. The book is presented with a great deal detail, which makes for a somewhat slower read, but the subject necessitates the slow, methodical weaving he sets out to do.

Sellers is writing about the nature of the production of knowledge, and the implications that it had for industry, American public policy, and medical education. Even if he doesn’t specifically highlight the voices of the workers, Sellers’ work illuminates what the stakes were them. Many industrial workers distrusted the physicians who examined them, for they could be deemed unfit to work, thus hampering their chances to earn a living. When he does return to Carson’s work towards the end of the book, it is easy to understand her work as inheriting this rich history.

Sellers’ work is unique in that it first brought together medical and environmental history. In the wake of Hazards of the Job, a number of other studies of the environmental and health impacts of economic activity have followed, including Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (2006); David Naguib Pellow’s Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (2004); and Geoffrey Tweedale’s Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (2000).

Book cover of Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers by Michelle Murphy

Book cover of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago by David Naguib Pellow

Within the fields of Environmental history and the History of science, Sellers’ book makes another key historiographical intervention. Given that industrial diseases could not be studied only in the laboratory because a) their cause wasn’t always known and b) often it was a combination of environmental factors along with the pollutants themselves which produced the illness, the type of medical and environmental knowledge produced required study in industrial settings. In this regard, the early industrial work-place was neither a “field”, such as we might find in environmental histories of particular geographic regions, nor “the laboratory”, in the case of a specific type of invention or discovery.

Beyond these two fields, Sellers makes wider contributions. By looking at the specific hazards that workers were exposed to, his work contributes to histories of labor, as well as histories of public health as it outlines specific tensions between medical education and industrial activity.

When we eventually meet Rachel Carson’s book, as the book draws to an end, we are able to understand not only the specific historical processes that resulted in increasing knowledge of toxins like DDT, but also the peculiar relationships of research between industry and health professionals. These research activities served to confirm the “benignity” (232) of American commodities in the latter part of the 20^th century. This helps the reader understand, for example why even though knowledge of lead poisoning was common, leaded gasoline boomed in production until its eventual-phase out in the 1970s.

Ultimately, Sellers’ book is a valuable contribution to multiple fields and there is much within it that can be mined depending on one’s interest. It is a a challenging but rewarding read for anyone interested in the history of environmentalism.

IHS Climate in Context Roundtable Book Review: Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (2018) Edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Reviewed by David Rooney and Felipe Vilo Muñoz

Modern Fossils: What Objects Tell Us About the Anthropocene / David Rooney

Future Remains is a collection of essays that explore how objects might narrate increasing human dominance over the environment and the lessons we can glean from that shift in perspective. What would a museum of the present look like? What items and memories of our current epoch would make the cut, representing this time of climate change and rapid technological leaps for a future historian? Future Remains attempts to answer these questions, cataloging a series of objects curated by an “Anthropocene Slam” that invited artists and scholars to give a ten-minute pitch defending their item as representative of the Anthropocene.

Cover of Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene

“Anthropocene,” from Anthropos (man) and cene (recent), is a term put forth by earth scientists Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen to designate a new geological epoch defined by the unprecedented effect of humanity as a geological agent. The Anthropocene frame has been taken up by a variety of scholars, activists, and techno-optimists in a surge of interdisciplinary scholarship and policy advocacy. Fifteen objects made the cut, playfully entitled a “Cabinet of Curiosities.” The items ranged from the feathers of a goose destroyed by the impact of a jet engine to a jar of layered North Carolina beach sand and a recording of a Māori re-creation of an extinct bird call. Some essays, like Laura Pulido’s on climate and racial sacrifice, offer a broader theoretical perspective on Anthropocene, but the bulk of the works attempt to make sense of the Anthropocene through a specific item selected from the cabinet. Future Remains is divided into four thematic sections, each revealing core aspects of the Anthropocene and charting divergent futures: an anthropocentric acceleration of modernization to geo-engineer nature or a self-reflective, ethically driven “slowing down” of human exceptionalism.

The first section, Hubris, catalogs a set of beliefs about how we might turn the universalism of the Anthropocene in humanity’s favor. Thomas Matz and Nicole Heller’s essay on the history of a jar of North Carolina sand carefully teases out both the futility of geo-engineering beaches and the interests of capital that decide these actions for the many. Examining concrete and the pesticide pump, other essays in this section reveal how little knowledge most observers truly have about the seemingly banal (concrete mixing) or the ecological (the effect of pesticides). Joseph Masco’s chapter on the use of nuclear explosions to exploit the environment is an eye-opening criticism of the hubris of those who believe humanity must become “good gods” to ride out the Anthropocene. Gregg Mitman pleads for readers to not leave the Anthropocene to the seemingly objective analysis of chemistry and geology. Instead, the Anthropocene must become a site of social contestation to establish equitable futures.

The second section deals with life and death in the Anthropocene. Gary Kroll, borrowing heavily from Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, remarks that death cannot be avoided in the Anthropocene. His essay examines the remains of a goose that collided with an airplane’s turbine engine and forced an emergency landing, what became known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Plane-animal collisions have become so common that the term “snarge” was coined to describe the remains of animals killed from human transportation systems. For Kroll, all forms of life (especially geological actors like humans) participate in some form of killing as a result of our inevitable entanglement with other beings. The inclusion of a feather from the goose killed by a jet engine asks observers to ponder how to become more thoughtful and concerned with how industrialized lifestyles produce murders. In this vein, Pulido situates the Anthropocene as a racial world-order, where predominantly white countries are unconcerned with the environmental devastation and premature deaths they hoist onto “darker nations,” a criticism reflected in Julianne Lutz Warren’s description of colonial violence in New Zealand.

Helicopter hovers over the Hudson River as emergency services respond to a crashed flight. — US Airways flight 1549, also called Miracle on the Hudson, made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after the airplane flew into a flock of Canada geese and severely damaged both engines on January 15, 2009. Source: Jim Davidson

The third section focuses on labor. A monkey wrench reminds us of the physical work required to power the industrial machines that pollute the globe, while a Quaker quilt ties together slavery, complicity in violence, and the limits of human agency. The concluding theme, “making,” connects the forms of self-reflection inspired by the Anthropocene, including literal self-reflection in a mirror. Tying these works together, Robert Emmett describes Jared Farmer’s discussion of e-waste in connection to the power of art, re-working the Anthropocene in a more “beautiful” way. The physical objects examined concretize this argument, reflecting the social worlds and emotive connections that inform environmental perspectives.

The book covers a variety of perspectives from different authors, often in agreement but sometimes in explicit contrast with one another. At times this makes for a jarring read. However, this can also be considered a strength. By crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries, the combination of different perspectives unsettles any easy account of our current epoch. Indeed, the function of these objects is not simply to paint an accurate tale of the Anthropocene and its core actors in a way that might satisfy future curiosity. Rather, the power of these objects is that they are curious and strange: they provoke stories and “structures of feelings” that inspire readers to relate differently to the environment and to each other. I would recommend this accessible book to historians, social theorists, and anyone interested in critical scholarship on class or race and the debates over how to situate these within environmental history.

David Rooney is a graduate student in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Anthropocene: Reshaping the Past to Remake the Future / Felipe Vilo Muñoz

A decade ago, I used to go on excursions with my physical geography class. I learned how to recognize different geological periods by examining a hillside terrain’s colors on those trips. One gets an idea of the vast geomorphologic cycles that have shaped the Earth for millions of years by looking at the terrain. Our current existence will become yet another layer of sediment in future strata. For many of us, epochs such as the Miocene or Holocene are little more than a name, but we might start to think about what kind of color our current time will be painted. Will it be a brighter color? Or might it be another murkier layer in our planet’s history?

*Sediment strata at Puerto Tranquilo in Chile. Source: Sergejf*

Stretching the past to recognize our mark on an unwritten future is at the core of the notion of the Anthropocene. This period acknowledges that our species has started to modify the planet as a new dominant geological force. What were the origins of our impact on the earth? And what might our remains mean to historians of the future? Future Remains addresses these questions. In it, twenty-one authors propose fifteen different material objects that could become part of a global natural history museum––a cabinet of curiosities for a future we might not witness. For the moment, we can reflect on this temporality-in-the-making. “The Anthropocene,” Rob Nixon writes in the first chapter, “thus pulls us simultaneously into deep pasts and deep futures that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable terrain for historiography” (5).

Identifying when people started to change nature is not easy. However, the firsts chapters specify some elements that give us a glimpse of how many changes human intervention has brought to our planet. Some chapters center on the past century, such as Joseph Masco’s “Project Plowshare,” a promotional film that explained plans to use nuclear explosions as a geoengineering tool for construction and mineral extraction. This plan never became a reality, but it gives us the first glimpse of our role in taming nature. Another chapter considers a deeper past. In “Anthropocene in a Jar,” Tomas Matza and Nicole Heller detail the historical reconstruction of the Wrightsville beach in North Carolina and its different sediments collected in a kimchi jar. This pot contains different colors and stripes that reflect different periods of the beach’s history. The stripes also show the effects of beach “nourishment”–– the practice of importing sand that has reshaped the coastline since the first decades of the twentieth century. Similarly, the chapter “Concretes Speak: A Play in One Act” addresses this material’s connection to humans, from the footprints of ancient cultures of 6500 BCE to our modern skyscrapers. These three examples reflect an initial step toward understanding the new dynamics of our “hubristic presence” on this planet. Nevertheless, the most significant human impact has occurred in recent centuries with the onset of global warming. For historians of the Anthropocene, this is a breaking point in our planet’s history.

Excavators and construction vehicles perform beach nourishment during nighttime — *Beach nourishment in Duck, North Carolina. Source: Christopher Blunck*

As sea levels and temperatures rise, provoking fires and deforestation, the Anthropocene has reshaped natural conditions. We are left with hard choices to sustain our presence with the rest of planet life forms. Gregg Mitman’s chapter adds to the Anthropocene debate, arguing for a relational approach with the living forms that coexist with us. Here, the vision of the “good Anthropocene” in which technoscience will provide innovative tools to regulate our impact on nature intertwines with the possibility of a dystopic future in which we might follow the fate of other extinct species.

The entanglement of those two positions appears in Josh Woda’s “Artificial Coral Reef,” Nils Hanwahr’s “Marine Animal Satellite Tags,” and Elizabeth Hennessy’s “Cryogenic freezer box.” Together these give us a taste of this imminent future. Here, the fabrication of material devices sustains our combination of demanding resources alongside the regulation of natural habitats. This applies even more so for Hennessy’s chapter which reflects of using cryogenic technologies to bring back extinct species.

Other chapters recognize how our actions impact the lives of non-humans. Gary Kroll’s “Snarge” chapter questions the normalization of animal killing and the destruction of habitats. Julianne Lutz Warren’s chapter, “Huia Echoes,” captivates the reader with recordings of a Maori voice attempting to reconstruct the sounds of an extinct bird. In these examples, we understand the menace that our species presents to endangered life forms. Nevertheless, the history of those extinct or endangered species reminds us that we could share the same misfortune.

Following a wildlife strike (collision), USDA WS personnel or their partners collect evidence and “snarge” from the damaged plane. Snarge is the residue smeared on a plane after a wildlife strike. — Following a wildlife collision, USDA WS personnel or their partners collect evidence and “snarge” from the damaged plane. Snarge is the residue smeared on a plane after a wildlife strike. Source: USDA.

Other essays address how the Anthropocene can also make us rethink our present. In “The Mirror— Testing the Counter-Anthropocene,” Sverker Sörlin questions whether this ecological imbalance is a problem of our current time. He considers that our present can find other answers that could reshape how we construct the Anthropocene. As a result, Sörlin present us how Anthropocene hasn’t determined our fate, on contrary humanity is constantly writing its own present. Thus, the author endorses an “Anthropocene of hope”, which is continually evolving with us from the permanent actions we create about the planet.

In this way, Anthropocene historiography creates a mosaic view in which different images make us think about divergent possibilities for our species. Our actions will continue to reshape the Anthropocene, forever remaking our cabinet of curiosities. The only thing that remains clear is that this new period has given us the responsibility to start writing history. In doing so, we will give color to the sediments that we leave to our descendants in the eons to come. Thus, Future Remains should be reading as an invitation to rethink our responsibility in our historical footprint making. A task that we are still struggling to accept to its full extend.

Felipe Vilo Muñoz is a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

15 Minute History – Climate and Environmental History in Context

Guests: Megan Raby, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin & Erika Bsumek, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

How do historians teach Environmental History in an age where stories of climate change and catastrophe fill the headlines? Megan Raby and Erika Bsumek, both History Professors and Environmental Historians discuss what drew them to the field, how they talk about environmental history with their students, and the 2021 Institute for Historical Studies Conference, “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented” (April 22-23). “Among many other questions, the conference will ask: Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?”

Episode 131: Climate and Environmental History in Context

Continue Listening

Mentioned in today’s episode:

Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (2017) by Nükhet Varlik

Banner image for Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (2017) by Nükhet Varlık

The historiography of the Black Death has tended to cast the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe.” Nükhet Varlık does admirable work in breaking down this Eurocentric view by tracing the Black Death’s history during the rise of the Ottoman Empire, a history she considers as a long process of recurrent outbreaks rather than an isolated event. Varlık frames her work within the historiography of diseases, creatively intertwining environmental history, the history of science, and imperial political history. Moreover, she models how historians can work with up-to-date scientific research, including recent studies in epidemiology, genomics, ecology, and bioarchaeology.

Varlık argues for a correlation between the plague’s epidemiological patterns and the empire’s consolidation, which is visible through the interaction among ecological zones as human and nonhuman mobility increased. These mobile nonhuman agents included fleas, lice, rodents, and the pathogenic bacteria Yersinia pestis, and they determined the plague’s expansion and waves of recurrence. While ‘global’ histories of disease tend to flatten social differences and take connections for granted, Varlık builds upon the idea of a ‘network’—a dynamic set of relationships that assemble the asymmetrical flow of ideas, humans, goods, animals, as well as pathogens.

Plague and empire focuses on what conventionally has been called the “second plague pandemic” (the Black Death) —the first being the Justinian plague and the third the East Asian plague. Nevertheless, the second pandemic was not a single discreet event that took place in 1348. It consisted of several waves of epidemics over 250 years. It is no coincidence, Varlık argues, that this period coincided with the transformation of the Ottoman semi-nomadic regime into an extensive empire in the eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, she situates the Ottoman epidemic cycles within the context of imperial expansion and the conquest of cities like Edirne and Istanbul as trade connections with Europe and Asia increased. Thus, she overcomes a variety of historiographic fallacies, including the “westward diffusion of the plague,” Turkish indifference to the Black Death (fatalism), and “epidemic boundaries” between the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean worlds.

*The Black Death: Map of the World with vignettes, watercolor by Monro S. Orr. Source: Wellcome Library*

Varlık synthesizes historical primary sources with current scientific research on the etiology of the plague, including new understandings about the interaction among hosts (such as rodents, humans, and other mammals), vectors (fleas and lice), and the pathogen (Yersinia Pestis). She also explains how the disease remained “inactive” in wild foci of animals––that is, groups of infected animals that became plague reservoirs. Moreover, she suggests that climate played a role in the migration of some of these hosting species.

The book employs a wide range of documents such as medical treatises, travel accounts, and official reports, not only from Turkish sources but also from Arabic, Byzantine, Italian, and Iberian sources. Although there is an apparent absence of the plague in early Ottoman sources, she explains that it does not mean a real absence of the disease. Instead, she argues that the plague gradually became significant enough to register in Ottoman culture as the empire urbanized and its officials moved between territories. Thus, environmental factors became entangled with perceptions and knowledge about the plague and governmental measures for controlling outbreaks.

Despite its broad regional scope, Plague and Empire centers on Istanbul. Methodologically, this choice makes sense, particularly after its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, because this new capital became the primary node where imperial and epidemic networks converged. Varlık’s focus on connections helps us understand how Istanbul was not isolated, but the core of governmental processes and the catalyst of epidemic waves in the Western Mediterranean.

Varlık’s model of intertwining imperial history and the flow of disease could productively be applied and tested in other contexts, including different epidemics. For instance, thinking about smallpox epidemics in the Conquest of America––simultaneous in time with this long Black Death––could be a fruitful comparison. Another case to think about is our current context of dealing with COVID-19. Considering its zoonotic origins, environmental drivers, post-modern circulation networks, and the state’s crucial role and supranational institutions to control its spread, we have much to learn from Varlık’s approach.

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World constitutes a bold and reliable approach to the history of diseases in imperial and globally-connected perspectives. It incorporates current scientific research in ways that make it relevant across disciplines. Varlık carefully links social, political, and environmental analysis. As a result, the book offers not only a crucial addition to the new historiography of diseases but also makes a contribution that is relevant to our present pandemic experience.

Check out Dr. Varlik’s talk at the IHS Climate in Context conference.

Review of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (2018) by Dagomar Degroot

Banner image for Review of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, by Dagomar Degroot (2018)

This review is part of the wider IHS Climate in Context Series. For more content, see here.

As the world struggles with unpredictable weather patterns and unstable food supplies caused by the current climate crisis, many have turned to the past for answers. Climate change is not new to human history. The Earth experienced a global drop in temperatures starting in the thirteenth century and continuing into the mid-nineteenth century, known as the Little Ice Age. Books on the Little Ice Age, such as Geoffrey Parker’s The Global Crisis, often highlight how the Earth’s cooling climate wreaked havoc on societies around the world as people struggled to adapt. Dagomar Degroot’s The Frigid Golden Age deviates from this standard narrative. He argues, instead, that the Dutch Republic, now the country of the Netherlands, actually flourished during, and even in part because of, the Little Ice Age.

Front and back of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, by Dagomar Degroot (2018)

Degroot explores how the years from 1560 to 1720, a period often referred to as the Dutch Golden Age, the Dutch Republic experienced an era of relative stability and strong economic growth that, counterintuitively, coincided with the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age. Did the Little Ice Age create climatic conditions that allowed the Dutch to flourish? Degroot stresses that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. He highlights that the reasons behind Dutch prosperity were complex and tied to a variety of factors that were also independent of fluctuating weather conditions. He admits, however, that the cooler temperatures did prove advantageous for the entrepreneurial and resilient Dutch.

Thus, as societies across the early modern world struggled to cope with cooling temperatures and decreased crop yields, Dutch society remained largely malleable to these changes and, at times, took advantage of them. For example, the changing climate shifted sea ice that facilitated their exploitation of Arctic resources, produced adverse weather conditions that aided in important Dutch military victories against English and Spanish forces, and influenced Dutch culture through the emergence of winter landscape paintings depicting the consequences of the Little Ice Age.

For the majority of his book, Degroot examines the effects of the Little Ice Age on Dutch commerce, conflict, and culture. He examines how the changing climate affected each of these aspects of the Dutch Republic by applying a three-part method. In using this methodology, he convincingly addresses the issues of scale and causation when connecting climate trends to human activities.

In the first step of this method, he determines how long-term global climate changes influenced local environments across short timeframes. For example, he highlights how cooling temperatures across northern Europe increased the frequency of autumn storms in the North Sea. Second, he uncovers examples of short-term, local environmental changes that affected human activities on similar temporal and geographic scales. For instance, and in connection with his discussion of Dutch commerce, he discovers that more shipwrecks often coincided with stormy autumn seasons. Degroot, however, notes that large, ocean-going Dutch merchant ships often survived the storms and in turn used the storms’ powerful winds to shorten their journeys. In his final step, he establishes the relationship between climate change and human history over long timeframes and large geographical areas. For example, while the increased frequency of storms also increased the risk, and thus the cost, of traveling on the North Sea, they also sped up the journeys of Dutch ships, increasing efficiency and decreasing the amount of time sailors were exposed to the deadly elements. His innovative methodology allows him to parse out how the Little Ice Age influenced how the Dutch conducted commerce, waged war, and responded culturally to climate change.

The Battle of Terheide, Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten, 1653 - 1666 — **The Battle of Terheide, Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten, 1653 – 1666**. Between 1652 and 1674, three naval wars were fought with England – the so-called Anglo-Dutch Wars. This painting represents the Battle of Terheide during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. The Dutch Republic won the battle but lost its commander Tromp, who was fatally wounded. Source: Rijksmuseum

The Frigid Golden Age is a detailed, empirical study that brings to light the ways in which the Dutch Republic adapted to the changing climatic landscape of the Little Ice Age. Degroot draws on an expansive array of evidence, from ship logs to landscape paintings to tree ring analyses to depict the complex nature of Dutch society and its relationship with a changing climate. His work provides a refreshing perspective on the Dutch Golden Age by focusing not only on merchants and political figures, but also on farmers, craftsmen, and soldiers that comprised the Republic’s cosmopolitan nature.

Degroot offers a rich and valuable contribution to the scholarship on the Little Ice Age and climate history more generally. Written in clear and lucid prose, he generally maintains a fine balance between detailed forays into paleoclimatology and engaging vignettes through a thoughtful analysis of his sources. His work successfully challenges the reader to scrutinize human activity in the face of climate change and provides an innovative framework to explore the effects of climate change and how societies can adapt to changing environmental circumstances. The Frigid Golden Age is a must-read for those interested in climate history or early modern Dutch history, and for anyone broadly interested in the implications of climate change on human societies.

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden by Elizabeth Hennessy (2019)

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. By Elizabeth Hennessy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xx + 310. 20 illustrations, notes, 4 maps, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

Located about 400 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands hold profound cultural importance as symbols of conservation, wild nature, and biodiversity. Charles Darwin visited the islands in 1835 and his encounters with the fauna of the Galápagos went on to shape his 1859 work On the Origin of Species. In contemporary times, statues of Charles Darwin await tourists in almost all of the small settlements on the islands. Scientists with UNESCO, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the Charles Darwin Research Station on the archipelago, architects of the current conservation project, present conservation as a continuation of Darwin’s legacy. However, in many ways, by seeking to reconstruct a pure “state of nature,” the conservation efforts that started to take shape in the 1930s have led to a contradictory project of stripping the islands of past traces of humanity through far-reaching and sometimes violent intervention.

In On the Backs of Tortoises, Elizabeth Hennessy frames the lumbering, armored reptilians of the Galápagos as “boundary objects”—material points of convergence between different spheres of action—that have been encoded with seemingly bottomless layers of meaning over time. First encountered by desperate sailors or pirates in the South Pacific as a live-saving source of food and water, turtles have been transformed by scientists, international mass media, and tourism into conservation icons and the recipients of legal protections. Simultaneously, local fishermen, often demonized by international media, despise the turtles as a metonym of the broader conversation project.

Drawing from extensive fieldwork conducted in the Galápagos working alongside scientists, as well as archival research using a mix of unpublished correspondence and published scientific articles and books, Hennessy weaves together a lively and engaging historical narrative that shines a light on the contradictions inherent in the current discourse of biological conservation. While conservation is often misrepresented as apolitical, Hennessy shows how the movement to establish the islands as nature preserves represented a continuation of imperial power dynamics. The Ecuadorian state had a vested political interest in developing the archipelago, which clashed directly with the interests of American and European scientists who wished to prevent species like the giant tortoises from going extinct. Although the local economy depends on tourism and the conservation industry, living in a nature preserve subjects galapagueños to increased policing and restriction. In fact, many of the leading scientists at the research station openly discuss the very presence of people in the Galápagos as a nuisance.

*Galápagos Giant Tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Station, Isla Santa Cruz, the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. Source: Elias Rovielo*

In this way, Hennessy’s work inserts itself into well-established historiographical conversations about colonial conservation initiatives in environmental history. Others works along similar lines include Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism or Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Wood. At the same time, the book is also well-grounded in methodologies from the history of science. This shows through particularly well in Hennessy’s fieldwork with the scientists and fishermen of the Galápagos. Bringing these two fields into conversation, combined with interventions drawn from political ecology and animal history, she destabilizes hegemonic assumptions about the difference between “nature” and “culture,” which have informed the development of the conservationist discourse. Though she acknowledges that the consciousness of the tortoise lies beyond human comprehension and biologists know very little about their sensory or cognitive faculties, she nonetheless effectively shows their ability to transform local landscapes and vegetation patterns. More significantly, she demonstrates their semiotic function as a multifaceted “object” deeply embedded in political and cultural discourse. Rather than a tortoise-eye view of history, this remains a history centered on human interactions with and perceptions of tortoises.

A well-written and engaging book on a topic that many students will have at least some cultural knowledge (and likely many misconceptions) about, On the Backs of Tortoises would make excellent reading for any class on the history of science, environmental history, or the history of tourism. Due to the accessible style and the captivating narrative, the book will also appeal to many members of the general public, especially anyone who works in or has an interest in biology or conservation. The questions Hennessy raises about the fraught, entangled relationships among scientists, society, and the non-human world, as well as her treatment of the tortoises as historical actors, will surely help drive interesting and productive discussions. This book deserves praise for so effectively presenting the history of a place popularly constructed to lie outside the domain of human affairs to readers in an accessible, coherent way.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery

On the eve of the Civil War, an advertisement appeared in the Texas Almanac announcing the sale of five enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel.

“Negroes For Sale––I will offer for sale, in the city of Austin, before the Stringer’s Hotel, on the 1st day of January next, to the highest bidder, in Confederate or State Treasury Notes, the following lot of likely Negroes, to wit. Three Negro Girls and two Boys, ages ranging from 15 to 16 years. The title to said Negroes is indisputable” —The Texas Almanac, Austin December 27th, 1862

Image of the cover of The Texas Almanac for 1862 — via Portal for Texas History

This hotel was one of the many businesses in Austin using enslaved labor, a commonplace practice that extended to every part of Texas. However, urban slavery in Austin differed substantially from slavery on the vast plantations that stretched across Texas’ rural geography. Unlike rural planters, urban slaveholders were largely merchants, businessmen, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals. The urban status of these slaveholders in Austin meant that enslaved people performed a wide variety of tasks, making them highly mobile and multi-occupational. Austin property holders, proprietors, and city planners built enslaved labor not only into the city’s economy, but into its very physical space to meet local needs. This examination of the Stringer’s Hotel provides a brief window for looking into Austin’s history of slavery and perhaps the history of enslaved people in the urban context.

Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the map's title and the eastern part of Austin — Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)

Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the blocks around the Avenue Hotel — Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)

On September 3, 1850, Swante Magnus Swenson purchased a city lot in Austin. In 1854, he built the Swenson Building on Congress Avenue where the current Piedmont Hotel stands today. Inside the building, on the first floor, were a drug store, a general goods store, a hardware store, and a grocery store; a hotel, (named the Avenue Hotel but locally known as the Stringer’s Hotel) was located on the upper two levels of the building. The Travis County Deeds Records show that sometime later, Swenson leased the hotel to a John Stringer, giving the hotel its name “the Stringer’s Hotel.” An 1885 Austin city Sanborn map of the Swenson Building shows that Swenson had a room built for “servants” in the hotel portion of the building. There is no documentation detailing whether enslaved people stayed in that room since the Sanborn map is dated twenty years after the Civil War. However, an 1889 Sanborn map shows that Swenson had the Stringer’s Hotel remodeled to remove the room for “servants,” which suggests that enslaved people originally potentially stayed there, given that “servant” and “dependency” were variant terms used for “slave” in urban spaces. The National Register of Historic Places Inventory notes that businesses on Congress Avenue did not have the financial capacity to maintain, let alone remodel, their properties right after the Civil War. This explains the twenty-year delay to remove the said “servants” room, no longer utilized by enslaved people in the 1880s. Further evidence also shows that Swenson himself had strong ties to slavery in Texas.

S.M. Svensson (via Wikipedia)

S. M Swenson was born in Sweden and came to New York as an immigrant in 1836 at the age of twenty. A few years after his arrival, Swenson worked as a mercantile trader. Through his trade dealings in the south, he befriended a slaveholder by the name of George Long, who then hired Swenson to work at his newly relocated plantation in Texas. A year later, when Long died due to poor health, Swenson married his widow, who then too died of tuberculosis three years later. By 1843, Swenson became a full-scale slaveholder in Texas through inheriting his now-deceased wife’s plantation. In 1848, he enlarged his property holdings by purchasing the adjoining plantation and expanding his cotton crop. In 1850, along with purchasing 182 acres a few miles outside of Austin, he bought the lot on Congress Avenue and constructed the Swenson Building and inside, the Stringer’s Hotel.

There are no records that detail the lives of enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel but other sources show that slaveholders expected slaves to fill a variety of roles in running their establishments on Congress Avenue. In his book, a Journey Through Texas, Frederick Olmstead describes his encounter with an enslaved woman who was responsible for tending to the hotel’s patrons along with upkeep and building maintenance. These slaves were also responsible for running errands and transporting goods. Many slaves also lived and traveled to and from homes and communities that formed on the outskirts of town. Traveling to and from their labor obligations or social engagements in their free time illuminates the various networks of movement created by the enslaved. Hence, given their relative independence, expectations, and responsibilities, it is not impossible to imagine enslaved people taking on leading roles in running the Stringer’s Hotel and other establishments in Austin.

Black and white photograph of the Avenue Hotel — Avenue Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries (via The Portal to Texas History)

The analysis of the Stringer’s Hotel through Sanborn maps and other qualitative sources illuminates the roles and occupations of enslaved people in Austin’s urban space. Unlike the enslaved people confined to the private domain of plantation estates, urban slaves worked in spaces with considerable mobility, meeting the needs of their owners and to fulfill their own social lives. Perhaps mapping the movement of enslaved people in this way, could allow for further interpretations of possible realities and lived experiences of enslaved people that archival texts obscure and make difficult to see.

Sources

“Negroes for Sale.” The Texas Almanac. December 27, 1862, 1 edition, sec. 34.
“Texas General Land Office Land Grant Database”, Digital Images, Texas General Land Office, Entry for Swenson, S M, Austin City Lots, Travis Co., TX, Patent no 429, vol.1
“Austin 1885 Sheet 5,” Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Map Collection, Perry-Castañeda Library, Austin, Texas.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. A Journey through Texas: or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989: 50;
Austin City Sanborn Map, 1885;
Bullock Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, accessed December 3, 2019

Additional Readings

“Bullock House.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association, June 12, 2010.
Gail Swenson. “S. M. Swenson and the Development of the SMS Ranches,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas, (1960).
Gage, Larry Jay. “The City of Austin on the Eve of the Civil War.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 63, no. 3 (1960).
Kenneth Hafertepe. “Urban Sites of Slavery in Antebellum Texas” in Slavery in the City, Edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, University of Virginia Press. (2017)
Jason A. Gillmer. Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821-1871. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, (2017)

You might also like:
Documenting Slavery in East Texas: Transcripts from Monte Verdi
Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past
Love in the Time of Texas Slavery

IHS Talk: Climate and Soil: An Environmental History of the Maya

The Late Holocene history of the ancient Maya world provides a microcosm of the Early Anthropocene. Much of the region today is tropical forest or recently deforested, but from 3,000 to 400 years ago Maya cities, farms, roads, reservoirs, and fields altered most of this region. Although a literate society, the written record provides little for environmental history; thus we can turn to climate and soil records. Climate played some role in periods of instability and stability and perhaps the Maya themselves caused some climate change. Indeed, ancient Maya climate change provides our clearest comparison with the modern Anthropocene because the ancient Maya also experienced sea level rise and climate drying like the contemporary world. But we are still—and may always be— uncertain about attribution of climate change to Maya history because of the imperfections in proxy data and the many unknowns about Maya adaptation and unrelated cultural changes. Soil tells us much more than climate about the Maya. The soil record from geoscience and archaeology provides direct evidence of human responses or lack of responses at times that correlate with other changes. Some responses of Maya Civilization that show up in soil studies were positive long-term impacts on the built environment, like wetland field systems, terraces, and other practices that enriched soils and ecosystems. The soil also indicates negative impacts like erosion and eutrophication, both playing out again today. But the Maya Classical period—with its peak human population and land use intensity— experienced less soil erosion, perhaps due to soil conservation. All of this study is still in its infancy because of the proliferation of lidar imagery that is providing a much better footprint of the impacts and infrastructure of the ancient Maya on their tropical forest.

Dr. Timothy Beach, holds a C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair and directs the Beach-Butzer Soils and Geoarchaeology Lab in Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. For twenty-one years, he taught at Georgetown University, where he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair and was Professor of Geography and Geoscience and Director of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs and Environmental Studies Programs. He has conducted field research on soils, geomorphology, paleoecology, wetlands, and geoarchaeology in the Corn Belt of the United States, the original corn belt of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, the Mediterranean in Syria, Turkey, and Italy, and some other places. His work earned funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, USAID, The University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown University. His field studies have been the bases for more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters and hundreds of scientific presentations around the world, including at the Vatican in 2017. Most of his publications were on long-term environmental change, soils and geomorphology, paleoclimate, and geoarchaeology in the Maya world. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and awarded Guggenheim and Dumbarton Oaks Fellowships, the G.K. Gilbert Award in Geomorphology, Georgetown University’s Distinguished Research Award in 2010, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service’s Faculty of the Year for Teaching Excellence in 2014, the Carl O Sauer Award in 2017, and the CSU Chico Alumni of the Year in 2018.

The Anthropocene and Environmental History

By Jesse Ritner

The Trinity test, a proposed starting point for the Anthropocene (via Wikipedia)

If you open a textbook on geology and flip through to the chapter on geological time it will tell you we are currently living in the epoch of the Holocene. The Holocene started approximately 10,000 years before present with the end of the last ice age. However, research by a diverse array of scientists, who specialize in geology, climate, historical ecology, archeology, and a host of other fields, have begun to question whether or not human impacts on climate mean that we have entered a new epoch in geological time. They call this new epoch the Anthropocene.

The concept of the Anthropocene is on one level quite simple. It is based in part on the science of climate change, which has quite convincingly shown that human activity is the most important driver of global warming. However, the science itself is quite complicated. The problem is that it is impossible to study historic changes in climate in of itself. Instead, scientists use proxies, such as methane or carbon dioxide concentrations in ice cores to measure greenhouses gases, pollen and charcoal in lake cores to measure ecological change and fire frequency, deuterium isotopes to estimate temperature, and a host of other proxies to try and trace how things like greenhouses gases have increased or decreased over time. In of itself, this is fairly routine, although by no means simple, work.

Another problem is that the concept of the Anthropocene is dependent on the idea of the human species as the ultimate driver of climate change. As such, scientists often have to work with archeologists or historians to discover if there is a corollary human action that may cause the climate anomaly they discover through their proxies. Proving these correlations is quite difficult, and often involves people with a number of specialties in order to account for long lists of variables. While radioactive dust dated to 1945 has a clear human cause in the dropping of nuclear bombs, other connections are harder to prove. As scientists look further back in time for earlier and earlier human impacts thousands of years ago, historical and archeological evidence becomes scarcer, making it more difficult to correlate climate change with human action.

(For a short video on the Anthropocene click here!)

Despite an immense increase in studies over the past two decades, scientists have been slow to officially adopt the Anthropocene as a new epoch. Difficulty in determining a starting point is perhaps the most famous objection, but concerns about human agency, anthropocentrism, and the validity of the proxies have caused some scientists to question the utility of the designation.

A Depiction of Epochs and Periods as Understood Through Geological Time Scales ( via Earth Environments)

Despite debate within the scientific community, the Anthropocene as a discourse has taken on a life of its own among humanists and social scientists. Their engagements can be split into three camps: those concerned with defining the Anthropocene, those concerned with the political ramifications, and those concerned the ethical relationship between nature and humans. For instance, historian John McNeill has written about the history of the great acceleration, its human causes, and how energy systems which result in high carbon emissions became standard. Others, like Dipesh Chakrabarty (also a historian), raise questions about the implications for contemporary politics if we begin to think of humans as a species, when humans do not all have equal impacts on climate. Issues of race, class, gender, and histories of capitalism and imperialism are all at risk of being overlooked by discussions about species level solutions to Anthropocene problems. Lastly, philosophers like Donna Haraway have critiqued the anthropocentrism of the idea that humans are just now changing climate. Haraway argues for what she calls the Chthulucene, a world in which humans begin to understand themselves as a part of nature, rather than outside of it. For better or worse, the Anthropocene is now unavoidable in conversations about the environment.

For historians in particular, the Anthropocene demands an integration of climatic and ecological change with the cultural, social, and political changes historians already study. This idea is not totally new. Classic works of environmental history, such as Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, both written decades before the Anthropocene existed as a concept, examine the historical effect of people on environments and the relationship between people and nature historically. But, ideas connected with the Anthropocene have caused a resurgence of historical work on the environment. Recent books such as James Scott’s Against the Grain and Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene explore how historians can contribute to discussions about the Anthropocene, both in placing its origin, in critiquing its anthropocentrism, in studying the differential impacts of humans on the environment, and in reverse, the impact of the environment on humans.

At Not Even Past, we want to help people work through these complicated questions. So here we are offering a growing list of book reviews and articles related to the environment and the Anthropocene. We hope this brief introduction, and the list below, can act as a resource for teachers looking to build curriculum on environmental histories, while also providing an easy and accessible portal for curious readers to scholarly debates regarding history and the environment.

Cotton, Coal, and Capitalism: Review of Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation and On Barak’s Powering Empire

Review of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (1997) by Christopher Sellers

IHS Climate in Context Roundtable Book Review: Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (2018) Edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett

Modern Fossils: What Objects Tell Us About the Anthropocene / David Rooney

Anthropocene: Reshaping the Past to Remake the Future / Felipe Vilo Muñoz

15 Minute History – Climate and Environmental History in Context

Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (2017) by Nükhet Varlik

Review of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (2018) by Dagomar Degroot

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden by Elizabeth Hennessy (2019)

Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery

IHS Talk: Climate and Soil: An Environmental History of the Maya

The Anthropocene and Environmental History

Books on Environmental History

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, by Karl Jacoby (2003)

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States by John Soluri (2005)

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin (2010)

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry (2018)

Articles on Environmental History

Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

Climate Change in History

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Enclaves of Science, Outposts of Empire

Of How a Hopi Ancient Word Became a Famous Experimental Film

Big Bend – “Some sort of scenic beauty”

Naming and Picturing New World Nature

For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History

The Environment i n History & History in the Environment

Great Books and a Film on the Amazon

Recent Posts