Environmental Histories

This course will explore histories of empire in comparative perspective. It provides students with an introduction to global environmental history by focusing on the changing relationships between people and their natural environments. It takes a transnational approach, exploring various case studies drawn from different imperial settings and temporalities. We will look at the development of early states, the growth of the capitalist world economy in the Atlantic, successive periods of empire-building in Africa and Asia, new forms of resource extraction and changing commodity flows, and environmental politics, while placing the natural world at the center of our analysis. In this course, we will use a more expansive definition of imperialism to include not only formal territorial empires, but also informal economic ones and various post-colonial forms of domination. Other themes to be explored will be: changing perceptions of the natural world, industrialization, warfare, urbanization, technological transformations, and changes in production and consumption. The goal is that students will develop of better understanding of the modern world and the ways in which humans have radically changed their natural environments.