Empire Forestry, Famines and Communities – Week 10 Flashcards
Key themes:
o The focus on the political and the administrative dimensions of empire have occluded the practical material impacts of colonization on people’s lives and on land, animals, fish, forests and other facets of their ecological contexts. Here with a focus on India we look at:
o Capitalism, Colonialism and its impact on nature
o colonial scientific interventions in the form of botanic gardens and forestry
o the nature of colonial science and the links between science and empire in depth.
o the history of forest reserves and the impact on local communities.
Colonialism, Capitalism and Nature:
o Over the period 1670 to 1950, very approximately, a pattern of ecological power relations emerged in which the expanding European states under East India Companies acquired a global reach over natural resources in terms of consumption and then too, in terms of political and ecological control.
o Indeed, even before the advent of large continental-based European empires in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the scale of artificially caused environmental change was already being transformed as European maritime countries started to exploit new kinds of natural resources on a global scale.
o Sugar and other crops essential to the new urban markets of Europe were cultivated on small islands, especially in the West Indies, Indian Ocean, and East Indies. After about 1400, fisheries extended to an oceanic scale as seals and whales were hunted from pole to pole.
Responses and the emergence of a Western science of nature?
o Before the 1760s, the effects of colonial economic globalization were addressed on a piecemeal basis in order to protect local food, fuel, timber supplies, and what were already recognized as rare island species.
o However, in the mid-1760s, responses to deforestation in particular suddenly changed. This was due to the rapid spread of a theory, first enunciated in France by Pierre Poivre, that linked deforestation to rainfall and regional climate change.
o Poivre, William Roxburgh and other naturalists both French and British who had observed the effects of extensive deforestation in the East Indies and on Mauritius, explored the specific climatic impact of tropical forest clearance.
Botanic Garden Network:
o In Kew, Calcutta, Mauritius and the Cape a network of botanic gardens were set up to facilitate plant exchange and counter famine particularly by William Roxburgh the director of the Calcutta botanic garden in the 1790s
o These gardens can be as part of a new , environmentally-driven agenda, so that experiments might be conducted that would educate and influence elite opinion in London, Paris and Amsterdam about existing or potential environmental deterioration
Early Forestry:
o The environmentalist initiatives of Poivre and Saint Pierre on Mauritius were exceptional. They legislated and theorized about deforestation, climate control, pollution control, fisheries conservation, and tree planting.
o Their initiatives were apparently imitated in the Caribbean, where the Kings Hill Forest Act was passed in 1791 on St. Vincent, again setting up a “rain reserve” in an upland part of the island.
o Similar measures were passed on the Atlantic island of St. Helena in 1794. Both islands had been affected by the El Niño-induced drought of 1791, a drought recognized as global in its impact by East India Company scientists as early as 1816
Debate on extinction:
o Ideas of extinction were taken up on oceanic islands such as Mauritius, this time by another French naturalist Louis Bouton, whose advocacy led to strengthened forest protection on the island and hence to the survival of the remarkable endemic birds of the island, apart from the dodo which was rendered extinct by the seventeenth century.
o By the late 1830s and the 1840s, the reiteration of climatic environmentalism by scientists Humboldt and Boussingault was being acted upon by environmentally minded scientists and officials working not just on the islands but on the large land masses of India, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and Australia, where the demands of European colonial empires were now bringing about deforestation at an unprecedented speed.
Colonial Science and the origin of environmentalism:
o Typically portrayed as derivative, instrumentalist and exploitative
o Importance to recognise that this is only a partial picture
o George Basalla’s seminal essay on the spread of Western Science, 1967, where he posited a universal model for the diffusion of western science from the initial phase of exploration- through to formal colonial dependence to formal independence
o Michael Worboys, Richard Grove and Roy Macleod instead stress the innovative nature of colonial science and scientists in the colonies such as Pierre Poivre particularly the field sciences such as Botany, Zoology, Geology and Forestry.
o This led to a precocious environmentalism that emerged not in the metropolitan centre but in the colonies (Richard Grove, Green Imperialism)
Forestry in India:
o Forestry in India draws on the German tradition of forestry (Ravi Rajan)
o Builds on modernist concerns, both environmental and commercial.
o Deforestation it is argued threatened damaging reductions in rainfall and increases in regional temperature. Potentially important drugs might be lost as little-known trees and plants were cut down, while fuelwood shortages would become serious. Famines would become more frequent. The loss of perennial streams would encourage diseases thriving in the stagnant watercourses left after deforestation.
o State control over forests was a move to diminish the right of traditional forest users over their resources.
Impact of British Forestry in India:
o By 1880, the Forest Department in India controlled one fifth of the land area of India and has preserved its big cats.
o The exclusionary forest reserve system, which often shut out hunters and farmers from their traditional resources, has caused chronic social conflict since its foundation.
Tribes, Forests and Famine:
o For tribal communities forest resources were of critical importance to not only for their economic and nutritional value but also for the cultural and aesthetic values encompassed within hunting, fishing and gathering activities and with the natural world in general
o Sacred groves- An area of land with spiritual significance where communities could not cut a single branch
Local Forests in Eastern India:
o There were many forest shrubs and trees which yielded fruit and which afforded valuable food supplements in years of scarcity.
o Slacke, in his report on the settlement operations in Chotanagpur estate in 1882, enumerated 21 species of seeds and fruits of 45 uncultivated trees which were used as food in addition to 34 trees the leaves of which are used as vegetables and 18 species of edible roots. Slacke also gives the names of 97 forest products used as medicines, 28 used as oils and gums, 17 used as dyes, and 33 creepers or barks of trees used as rope fibres.
o The length of these lists gives us some indication of the economic value of the jungles to the aboriginal inhabitants.
Hunting parties:
o Tickell describes in some detail the great hunting parties of the Hos in Singhbhum in the 1840s. He recorded that ‘from the burning of the grass till the new crop becomes too high, i.e. between January and June, the Ho tribes scour the jungles in large parties, and at uncertain periods, for wilder game, surrounding and driving to the centre the deer and other animals
o These were very different from the hunting parties of the British
The festival of the sacred grove:
o The local cultural and aesthetic values that were encompassed within hunting fishing and gathering activities also found expression in elaborate rituals and ceremonies that celeberated the natural world.
o For example the Mundas regarded the sun with awe and reverence and called it Sing Bonga. The worship of a rain god was also common among them and other tribes in Chotanagpur. More important, however, was the ritual significance of sacred groves.
Forest reserves in Eastern India:
o The destruction of the forests in Chotanagpur was followed by forest reservation
o the chief object of forest reservation was not to improve the condition of the jungles and restore access to the indigenous peoples but to improve government revenue.
o As Brandis noted; ‘Forest management in India has commenced to yield a steady and growing annual revenue to the state. This revenue might be much larger if the forests were not managed with the chief object of improving their condition, hitherto cuttings have been restricted’
Famine in a forest tract:
o The forested areas of Eastern India hit by famine for the first time in the late nineteenth century
o Famine repeatedly hit India every few years in the last decades of the nineteenth century
o Famines had been much more common in the plains and less in the forested regions as locals had managed to live off the fruits of the forest
o Colonial taxation and destruction of the environment pushed them into starvation in the famines of the 1890s
