Globalisation

Question 1

Henry Carey (Mid-19th Century)

Answer 1

• Influential in Europe, not so much America.
• Denounced British trade based on ecological-economic analysis - which predates conventional thought.
• Focused on soil anxiety. Thought on soil depletion led to dynamic theory of value based on the cost of reproduction. Called for development strategy based on local recycling of all goods (incl. Waste) from animate and inanimate sources.
• Rejected by JS Mill and Marshall, Schumpeter and Marx.
• Strong advocate of protectionism.
• Quotes: ’salvation, it is in me, and my books’; ‘“the rude produce of the earth to be sent to England, there to be subjected to those mechanical and chemical processes required for bringing it to the form in which it was fitted for consumption”; “”[speaking as Britain] Labor being cheap with us, we can manufacture more cheaply than you do. Do not, therefore, once and for all build mills or furnaces; continue year after year to expend your labors in carrying goods back and forth; continue to exhaust your land; continue to have no combination of effort among yourselves; and you will grow rich”
• Trade leads to ecological disaster - removes soil fertility from point of origin.
• Not Malthusian. Argues that progress in technology and social organisation could overcome scarcity. Where Malthus stipulated that society will have to resort to poor soil over time, he instead saw this as a stimulus for society to move from poor soils to rich ones.
• Argued Britain had become “the farmers of Brazil and the United States.”
• Value . . . is simply our estimate of the resistance to be overcome, before we can enter upon the possession of the thing desired.
• Just as Ricardo warned that British prosperity hinged on a willingness to freely trade grain, Carey insisted that compliance with the British policy of trade would lead inevitably to disaster, annihilating the potential gains from endogenous growth. Carey insisted that extensive trade with Britain would preclude the United States from enjoying the bounty of future technological progress.
• Carey rejected the idea that manufacturing would experience increasing returns to scale and that agriculture would be unable to avoid diminishing returns to scale. Instead, Carey proposed that returns to scale would be constant in manufacturing and rising in agriculture—at least in a regime of commerce.
• British farming models were ‘robbing the soil of its nutrients’

Question 2

Richard Ligon 1600s

Answer 2

Historian of the Caribbean. True and Exact History of the Caribby Islands: “I saw by the growth, as well as by what I had been told, that it was a strong and lusty plant, and so vigorous, as where it grew, to forbid all Weeds to grow very neer it; so thirstily it suck’d the earth for nourishment, to maintain its own health and gallantry.”

Question 3

Dumas 1800s

Answer 3

Air was the source of all movement in Dumas’s natural system. Air in the atmosphere absorbed, mixed and transported all the basic elements of life in a global cycle. What left the air always returned in altered form, to be carried forth once again. Air constantly redistributed the elements—hydrogen, carbon, ammonia, and nitrogen—to all earthly beings. ‘Veritable combustion apparatuses,’’ animals ‘‘reproduce carbonic acid, water, ammonia acid and nitrogen acid, and return them to the air.’’

Question 4

Marx 1800s

Answer 4

Human beings were mere possessors and beneficiaries of the soil, who “have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]”

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie overs the whole surface of the globe”… “it must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”

Question 5

Waring (1850)

Answer 5

“No soil is inexhaustible. The fertility of the earth’s surface depends on the presence in the soil of certain materials which are employed in the growth or formation of plants. These materials do not act externally. They enter the structure of the plant, and become incorporated with its parts, thus forever to remain until liberated by the decomposition of its tissues”

Question 6

Thomas Hancock 1880s

Answer 6

Commenting on what Gutta Percha is used in, ‘Almost every species of toy is made from this gum; the furniture, the decorations, and even the covering of our houses are constructed from it; and we make of it soles for our boots and shoes, and linings for our water cisterns. It is used for pipes, alike for the conveyance of water and sound.’

Question 7

William T. Brannt

Answer 7

“It may be said without exaggeration that if gutta percha and its properties had not been known, submarine telegraph lines would perhaps never have been successful.”

Question 8

Vandelli 1789

Answer 8

• Issue in Brazil - colonisation of the land was combining two negative and apparently opposite elements: under-settlement and over-exploitation.
• Vandelli’s progressive stance in economic matters made him disgusted with the fact that ‘the immense country of Brazil [was] almost deserted of people and uncultivated.”
• “Agriculture is expanding along the borders of rivers in the interior of the country, but it does so in a manner that in the future will reveal itself harmful. It consists of burning ancient forests whose wood, because of the ease of transportation by means of the river themselves, would be very useful for naval construction, or for extracting dyes, or for cabinet making.” (Doesn’t not want to cut them down…)

Question 9

Rodrigo de Sousa Countinho

Answer 9

• Countinho envisaged a federalisation of the Portuguese empire, with Brazil as the seat of the crown, and this increased his concern with the fate of Portugal’s largest colony.
• Countinho recruited young Brazilians to drive forward a vanguard of Brazilian environmentalism

Question 10

Jose Gregorio de Moraes Navarro (1799)

Answer 10

• Wanted to see the introduction of ploughing techniques, soil nourishment, banning of forest burning, reform of industrial hearths, conservation of forests
• Navarro’s conception of earth is that in which it is presented as a feminine force.

Question 11

Pierre Poivre (1760s)

Answer 11

• Persuaded of the value of tree planting and protection based on observations of Indian and Chinese forestry + knowledge of botanical gardening techniques from the Dutch.
• Exp. In Mauritis would lead him to preach the dangers of deforestation.

Question 12

Stephen Hales (1670s)

Answer 12

Hales spent much time devising models of the motions of the planets, and the circulation of blood. A multiple, but likned, preoccupation, on different scales, with planetary and bodily circulation thus emerges in his mind. From this point it was only a logical (and short) step to move on to consider the dynamics of atmospheric circulation.

Question 13

Montesquieu 1748

Answer 13

Stressed the influence on climate on the development of people - Mediterranean populations seen as less industrious whilst did not require as much labour to yield goods. North tended to be more capable.

Question 14

Labourdonnais 1735

Answer 14

Governor of Mauritius - found crop failure led to interventionist strategies to satisfy population food demands.

Early acquaintance with dearth seems to have awoken him to the basic limitations on the island. Immediate term, had to rely on Rodriguez to supply goods. Tortoises used for meat - resulted in extinction by 1740s.

Question 15

Alexander Von Humboldt

Answer 15

Emerged as the major figure behind the acceptance of a very specific kind of environmental world view.

Promotion of Edenic principles in New World pursuits -> interconnections of Man and Nature

Question 16

Herder

Answer 16

• Spoke vigorously against European dominance and the brutalising effect of great wealth: ‘Why do the poor suffer hunger and with benumbed senses drag on a wretched life of toil and labour? That the rich and great may deaden their senses in a more delicate manner’
• Fond of Indian culture: . The Hindus “are the gentlest branch of humanity. They do not with pleasure offend anything that lives. They honour that which gives life and nourish themselves with the most innocent of goods, milk, rice, the fruit of trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses… the most extreme yoke of humanity”

Question 17

Boussingault

Answer 17

• Strong interest in the consequences of deforestation stemmed not only from his academic specialisation in plant chemistry but more directly from a contemporary French preoccupation with deforestation, soil erosion and flooding.

Question 18

C.R. Markham - 1866

Answer 18

English Geographer - “Human action has produced great changes in the physical condition of the earth’s surface. Vast tracts of swampy wilderness have been converted into fresh pastures or cultivated fields, and barren uplands have been covered with stately trees. On the other hand, many regions, in all parts of the world, which were once clothed with verdure are now treeless and arid wastes. All these changes are the work of man… ”

Question 19

Marquis of Daihousie

Answer 19

Follower of Bentham - pushed for development of communication technologies to civilise Asians.

Question 20

Alfred Russel Wallace

Answer 20

One of the most celebrated naturalists of the Victorian era, perhaps best known for the so-called ‘Wallace Line’ that separates the faunal zones of Asia and Australia. Were it not for Darwin, he would almost certainly be remembered as the founder of evolutionary theory.

Question 21

Conwentz

Answer 21

Defined a natural monument as ‘an original—that is, entirely or almost entirely untouched by cultural influences—and characteristic feature of the landscape or an original and characteristic natural living condition of extraordinary, general, patriotic, scientific, or aesthetic interest’. It was a fuzzy concept open to all manner of interpretation.

First, the terminology of a monument focussed attention on individual areas or objects of natural history rather than on larger biophysical systems or communities. This was symptomatic of the concern of early nature protection—quite unlike environmentalism in the late twentieth century —with symbols of nature rather than matters such as pollution or health. Second, and more fundamentally, nature was primarily associated with the ‘untouched’ and ‘pristine’. It resided only where people did not.

Question 22

George Perkins Marsh

Answer 22

1864 - George Perkins Marsh - “The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures, and the mechanical arts, of military armaments, and especially of the commercial fleets and navies of Christendom within the present century, has greatly augmented the demand for wood”

Question 23

Case Studies

Caribbean Plantation

Answer 23

• 17th c. European colonisation saw removal of Taino, Arawaks, Caribs - gradually marginalised and driven to extinction by Europeans. New crops introduced replaced thousands of species.
• Conuco - farming style prior to colonisation which prevented soil erosion
• Francis Bacon - ‘Planting of countries’ comparative to planting woods. Takes 20 years to yield profit.
• Used for sugar - addictive, high consumption in Europe. Started 1640s, Barbados. 1645-60: Barbados transformed from poor tobacco colony to a significant producer of sugar.
• Annexation of Jamaica 1656 increased British sugar-control capacity.
• 120 slaves, 100 horned beasts, 12 horses and goats needed for plantation (Father Labat)
• Swine and cows reproduced rapidly in this environment.
• Horses were imported from Amsterdam - if 48 of the 52 loaded made it across, it was a successful venture. Highly profitable - would sell within two days according to Dr Sporri (vet who voyaged often). Animals exacerbated rates of soil erosion and compaction.
• Horses and oxen were used to drive rollers in sugar mill. Killed many. Whistler notes in 1654: “the mills they now use destroy so many horses that it beggars the planters”.
• “The Devil was in the Englishman, that he makes everything work; he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass work, the Wood work, the Water work and the Winde work.” - Slave.
• Barbados - tropical rainforest all but marginal by 1665. Colonel Modiford: “This island of Barbados cannot last in an height of trade three years longer especially for sugar, the wood being almost already spent”.
• Richard Blome remarks that the larger Jamaica had the capacity to receive colonists from “used up” islands: “is island being so large and fertile, it is capable of receiving those great numbers of people that are forced to desert the Caribbee isles: their plantations being worn out, and their woods wasted”.
• Bird population nose-dived, two species of tree went extinct (palmito and mastick), monkey population decimated. Parsley, cabbage, sage, lavender, onion, garlic - thrived on island.
• Mosquito - A. Aegypti - hit Barbados first. Predators - birds - were eliminated by deforestation. Empty clay pots provided stagnant water for breeding. Killed 20/30% of pop.

Question 24

Case Study

French Manure

Answer 24

‘The excremental material that a man produces in one day is enough to create twenty-five pounds of vegetable soil… make bread with human excrement’ - Pierre Leroux

The sexual passion stimulated a growing population and a demand that nature could not hope to supply. Leroux rejected the dire consequences of Malthus’s arithmetic and geometric ratios. When we eat, he argued, we recreate our own food.

French chemists in this period invented a cosmology of nature as the great recycler - seeing animal emissions as one end of an ever-renewing cycle

Even the venerable Victor Hugo promoted Leroux’s vision in a chapter of Les Miserables.Human manure promised a means to feed the poor without the aid of urban factories.

Dumas and Boussingault recast physiocracy in engineering terms. Like the physiocrats, the chemists believed that the most important kind of work, the most productive of value, was that of extraction. Man withdrew the stuff of life and resubmitted that same material into nature’s great circulation. In this industrial physiocracy, the body was the greatest, most efficient machine.

East Asian farmers appeared far ahead of Europeans in their agricultural economy. A chemist influenced by Dumas: ‘‘everyone knows how the Chinese today scrupulously collect excremental substances, liquid and solid, in order to use them in agriculture.

In ‘‘Jews, the Kings of Today,’’ Leroux’s natural recycling body found its antipode, the corrupt and bloated Jewish body. Humanity met its ‘‘GRAN NEMICO, . . . enemy, adversary, that is one who only exists as a negation, a contradiction of the one who exists truly and for himself.’’ As we have seen, Leroux incarnated his utopia in the natural body. Conversely, he embodied capital in the figure of the Jewish speculator.

Question 25

British Manure

Answer 25

• Victorian Britain experienced acute problems of sewage disposal. Sanitary matters had come to public attention following the publication in 1842 of Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain.
• In the early-nineteenth century there was an established market for the sale of the human and other waste of towns for use as a natural fertiliser.
• Artificial fertilisers did exist - like superphosphate and guano - but these necessitated high expenditure - guano rose to £10 a tonne in 1840s and to £12 a tonne by 1860s.
• The average of the various monetary assessments of human waste which were circulated in the early 1860s valued the total United Kingdom sewage at about £15 000 000 per annum.
• Royal Commission Endorsement of Sewage for Fertiliser - heavy land was found to be much less well-fitted for sewage irrigation than were light, sandy soils—and the extent to which auxiliary pumping of the sewage was necessary for its distribution over the ground.
• Irrigation process ran into operational problems for many. The irrigation process had to be closely managed and given constant attention, while sewaged crops were often weedy. Attempts to produce fertiliser by the artificial drying of collected waste, as was attempted in the “Eureka process” operated at Hyde in the 1860s, were similarly found to be financially unrealistic.
• Water, therefore, was “the best dung carrier” in as much as it facilitated transport of whatever fertilizing matter sewage contained to the land, and permitted ease of application.
• Alfred Carpenter - medical authority - used sewage farm as ‘health farm’.

Question 26

FRENCH & ENGLISH LANDSCAPES

Answer 26

• In France, there was no singular vision for the landscape - post-French rev, history mattered more than nature. Natural places preserved for their historical associations.
• While the latter strengthened the environmental movement in England, the preservation of Fontainebleau forest did not have such an impact on the national scale.
• England 1865 - Commons Preservation Society.
• Origins of British environmentalism – the Select Committee on Public Walks – 1833; or William Wordsworth and his famous battle against the Kendal Windermere railway line into the Lake District in 1844–45.
• Picturesque - term used to describe landscapes - readily applied to English landscapes
• Industrialism emerged in 1830s. English landscape however became a fundamental cultural identifier. Scenery of England, John Lubbock favourably compares the Lake District to other mountain regions of Europe: it stands out by its neatness, its variety, its human size.
• Charles Nodier - difference between landscape and monuments - landscapes eternal, monuments - ephemeral.
• Victor Hugo - Voyages aux Pyrenees - insisted on the eternity of nature as compared to the vicissitudes of history: “Whatever the new revolution that was taking place so close to us, it only troubled on the surface this severe and quiet nature. The wind that … shakes the thrones did not quicken the fall of the pine cone that flutters at the end of the branch”
• The two major environmental controversies England and France experienced in the nineteenth century were, respectively, the debate about Thirlmere and the fight to protect Fontainebleau Forest.
• In 1876, Manchester proposed to transform Thirlmere, in the Lake District, into a reservoir of drinking water for its ever-growing population. This gave rise to a very heated debate as some nature-lovers strongly opposed the transformation of these landscapes.
• In France, complaints about the degradation of Fontainebleau by the forest administration and quarries appeared as early as 1837, at which point Louis-Philippe agreed to stop the planned felling of trees.
• Fontainebleau was ‘the most remarkable for its sites and its special character of beauty and grandeur’, while Thirlmere and the mountainous region of the Lakes were ‘one of the most precious inheritances of the people of England’.
• Thirlmere - Sentimentalists – as they were called at that time – believed that these places, ‘where poet-passion and o’erburdened toil / Find consolation’
• The French arguments differed slightly. The insistence here was not so much on the naturalness of the forest itself as on its history. Regarded the forests as Armand Bertin - Jounral des Debats - ‘still living witnesses of the great centuries of our history’.
• If the forest is often presented as a museum for the nation, ‘the most precious museum of sites and landscapes France possesses, whose preservation should be justifiably assimilated to that of ancient monuments’.
• Paradoxical outcome: Thirlmere campaign failed, but sparked wider movement. Fontainebleau was successful but sparked nothing.
• Geography became popular after 1870 (FP War) - territorial integrity questioned.
• Similar outcomes - 1906 - French pass a monuments law, 1907 - Brits pass National Trust Act.

Question 27

FRENCH DECAY

Answer 27

• 1789 - Arthur Young - commented on ‘good grass that feeds a million of emigrating sheep’ in Barcellonette
• 1843 - Blanqui - ‘Whoever has visited the valley of Barcellonette…knows that there is no time to lose, that in fifty years from this date France will be separated from Savoy, as Egypt from Syria, by a desert.’
• Analogies with Algeria and Syria (then very much in the French mind because of colonial expansion), the encroaching desert, and the spectre of the decline and fall of Rome permeated the imagination and the rhetoric.

Question 28

Gutta Percha - 19th Century

Answer 28

• London -> HK = 100 days
• Dutch could not know the need to send reinforcements to Java to suppress Dipanegara revolt for months after it broke out (1825).
• Before electrical telegraphs, colonial powers relied on semaphores to communicate
• Telegraph invented 1847. First time physical forms of transportation could be avoided. Permitted imperials to ‘strengthen and perpetuate’ rule in the colonies.
• 8 species yielded GP - mostly Taban, Isonandra gutta or Dichopsis Oblongifolium
• In 1865, Karachi in India was in almost instantaneous communication with London, the Morse code signals flying over the wires, and although the first cables were plagued with technical difficulties, these had been largely overcome by 1870.
• 1907 - 200,000 nautical miles of GP lined telegraph cabling.
• Timber felling is always perilous work, and there must have been numerous deaths and injuries. The felled trees were left to rot on the jungle floor, with most of the latex untapped within them.
• 60ft tree = 312g of latex.
• Successive years in 1870s saw over 1000 metric tonnes of GP imported per year.
• Eugène Sérullas, the tree had disappeared from Singapore by 1857, from Malacca and Selangor by no later than 1875, and from Perak by 1884.
• First transatlantic cable would have required 88mil trees.

Question 29

Brazil

Answer 29

• Natural resources were the greatest tool for Brazil’s future development and should be treated carefully - to waste such a treasure would be a historical crime which should be combated by public authorities.
• This conception saw earth as passive and active - passive in taking human aggression; active in incubating revenge.
• Desiccation theory became popular in 18-19th c., developed by Halles, Buffon and Duhamel du Monceau - first modern scientific concept of climatic changes induced by humans; related loss of vegetation to the reduction of humidity, of rainfall and of springs in certain territories.
• Brazil still wanted to be utilitarian. Lisboa (1786) advocated tapping into cotton (Because England was establishing ‘thousands of factories’ to process it), alongside rice, indigo, coffee and grapes.
• Aciolli - necessary to strike a balance between intended conservation and the forest destruction required for economic progress. The elimination of forests would not be, he argued, entirely negative because they could aid in the improvement of the region’s ‘very rainy climate’, which had caused ‘many difficulties to the first settlers’. This was a curious inversion of the desiccation theory.
• These theorists were still bound by the logic which suggested that ‘the land, despite its antiquity, never loses its vitality’ (Navarro)

Question 30

Sugar Cane

Answer 30

• Typically grown in monoculture, with forest cleared primarily for plantations. Cane refinement also required substantial amounts of wood. Effort required to strip land demanded slave labour.
• Tended to be hardier than tobacco or cotton.
• Sugar c. 1500s/1600s came in through Oriental markets. Europeans wanted to circumvent this dependency. First plantations located in Madeira, 1452.
• 1 Tonne of sugar required 100m3 of fuelwood. -> 1,500,000m3 of wood used per annum. 4000 ha per annum.
• Barbados - 1647 - 1/5 rainforest cleared for sugar plantations.

Question 31

Coffee

Answer 31

• Perennial crop. Coffee groves can be grown on steep slopes where other cash crops cannot be easily sustained, but they often cause heavy erosion or the gradual depletion of soil nutrients.
• Expansion of coffee growth in the colonies was a method to circumvent dependence on Asian suppliers. French experimented with coffee production from 1720s in Caribbean.
• Consumption rates increased significantly after 1815 through Europe, and by extension, the US.
• From the late 1800s, Brazil was a prime zone for coffee growth. American purchases of coffee were key to the extension of frontier zones.
• Although American traders spent years in the coastal marketing offices of Latin American producers, they had no concern for what was happening in the landscape of supplying countries.

Question 32

Panama Canal

Answer 32

The great cut was fifty miles long; it had taken ten years to build, at a cost of $352 million, with a work force totalling hundreds of thousands. More than 6,000 workers died from disease and accidents, but new discoveries in tropical medicine had virtually eradicated malaria and yellow fever from the Canal Zone.

Question 33

Green Imperialism

Answer 33

• After about 1750 the rise to prominence of climatic theories gave a new boost to conservationism, often as part of an emerging agenda of social reform, particularly among the agronomes and physiocrats of Enlightenment France.
• Emerging knowledge that ancient empires fell because of environmental management - communities in the Southern Levant, for instance, (early 6000 B.C.) collapsed due to deforestation. (Trees were used as fuel for the production of lime plaster for building materials. Env damage also caused by herds of goats eating seedlings, saplings and shrubs, encouraging soil erosion)
• Central America - maize cultivation led to devastating soil erosion; a cause of disruption also in Mesopotamia.
• Fourth millennium B.C. Middle Eastern writers were aware of the formidable destructive power of the early agrarian and hydraulic empires and of the likely consequences of uncontrolled deforestation.
• Dante’s Purgatorio - an island in the ‘southern ocean’ offered the possibility of purgatory and redemption, while Dante himself must have been aware of the reality of the newly discovered islands in the Atlantic, the ‘Fortunate Islands’ of the Canaries and Madeira.
• The wars against Holland and Oliver Cromwell’s overseas adventures in the 1650s brought about an urgent need for new vessels and a renewed consideration state access to timber supplies. Although many hours of Commons debates during the Long Parliament were taken up in discussing appropriate responses to deforestation and the appropriate treatment of seized Royalist land, very little concrete legislative action was actually taken. The issue first made itself felt not only because of the amount of Royalist land, very little concrete legislative action was actually taken.

Question 34

Botanical Studies

Answer 34

• Late 15th century - Leonardo Da Vinci & Albrecht Direr - first truly botanical studies.
• By the 1630s the commercial as well as teaching potential of the Leiden botanical garden was realised sufficiently for the French government to take an interest in the establishment and support of the Jardin du Roi in Paris.

Question 35

St Helena

Answer 35

• The small size of St Helena and the heavy reliance which the East India Company placed upon it as a supply base meant that environmental and health risks necessarily became the special concern of the island’s governors and administration.
• 1502: Alex Beatson: ‘its interior was one entire forest’
• 1582: Cavendish: ’thousands of goats, seen up to 200 together and sometimes in a flock almost a mile long’
• 1816: Beatson: ‘to the goat, therefore, is solely to be ascribed the total ruin of the forests
• Within a century - all accessibly black ebony trees were taken. Coastal palms had all been burned, or cut for food and thatching. Javanese deer had been added, cash crops introduced, animals (goats, dogs, pigs, cats, rats). Many birds and tortoises had been made extinct (dodo).
• French Environmentalism: Leveraged the 17th century scientific revolution, reliant on climactic theory of a kind that had not been available to van Reede and his colleagues and which drew much of its inspiration from Newtonian physics.
• Desiccation theories went all the way back to Theophrastus.
• Until the end of the 17th century, conservationist policies in the colonial context were broadly associated with the development of an edenic discourse.
• Frequent use of fire to clear forest was seen as alarming by 1756.
• Mauritius - English control from 1810 - Chambers recounted ‘very shortly’, “It was noticed that the streams were shrinking… throughout Southern India, a similar policy has been forced upon the rulers by the urgent necessity of the case.”
• Forestry policies pursued on Mauritius, like the related innovations in state environmentalism developed a little later in the Eastern Caribbean and on St Helena, became important models for the state naturalists and conservation pioneers on the Indian sub-continent after the late 1830s.
• During 1770s, a set of company servants in Bengal believed the onset of British rule might have serious consequences for the incidence of drought and frequency of famine. “British rule, it was now said, implied a responsibility to assess and respond to growing evidence on rainfall levels. Principal proponent- Captain Robert Kyd.
• 1791-1833 - St Helena used as site for conservation experimentation - reforestation and attempts to artificially boost rainfall . Important - would influence forest conservation policy in India.
• East India Company - direct access to conservationist and desiccationist messages from St Vincent and Mauritius
• St Helena plays key role in Godwin’s Man in the Moone - acting as utopia

Question 36

Australia

Answer 36

By dint of their particularly strong scientific, educational and bureaucratic experiences, German- and, to a lesser extent, continental-trained scientists expressed similar environmental anxieties across India, Australia New Zealand.

By the twentieth century, governments across Australasia and India were increasingly relying upon scientific surveys of sand drift.

Scientists like Francis Ratcliffe in Australia, Leonard Cockayne in New Zealand or E. Benskin in United Provinces reported on sand drift.

Question 37

New Zealand

Answer 37

New Zealand and parts of Australia gained a reputation for their salubrity and suitability to the British constitution.

Question 38

India

Answer 38

From 1860s - professionally trained foresters began to take over the articulation and responses to environmental anxieties previously undertaken by many Scottish-trained medics.

Environmental concerns elevated by climate fears. Uprising in 1857 brought home vulnerabilities of British to their rule and soldiers.

Empire, especially in India, opened up many employment opportunities for medical graduates beyond the practise of medicine itself.

Untrammelled exploitation attracted the ire of many Scottish-trained medics, who began to express environmental anxieties about its effects from the late 1700s, most notably through the work of William Roxburgh on the connection between climate and famine.

Scottish-educated doctors held a variety of positions in provincial and colonial scientific bureaucracies in the British Empire and beyond . From the eighteenth century, they began to articulate a series of environmental anxieties in India about the direction of development, arguments that gathered pace in the nineteenth century and contributed to the rise in utilitarianism and shift to government intervention in the 1850s.

Based on a complex system of mathematical equations and detailed surveying techniques, the principles of German scientific forestry as eventually applied to India appeared to eschew sentiment and diversity for profit and conformity.

German scientists played a central role in consolidating, and then expanding, state forestry in India. Drawing from their own training and experiences, they provided a forestry management template, staffed a significant part of the IFS, and oversaw the expansion of state forestry on a national scale

Question 39

Industrial Britain

Answer 39

• Victorian progress came at the result of environmental integrity. Idyllic landscapes where exchanged for high-density urban conditions characterised by disease, filth, death and poverty.
• Resulted in the rise of Romanticism in 18-19th c. Anxieties of projected Romanticism with realities of urban degeneration were projected upon imperial endeavours.
• Romantic -Sharpe, follower of John Ruskin - was strongly against the destruction of the environment, and its preservation for future generations, mainly on religious grounds. Interpreting deforestation around Auckland and later Newcastle through the lens of romanticism and specifically ideas of Ruskin, Sharpe’s views demonstrate the importance of existing and changed local environment in generating aesthetic anxieties. They reinforce the close connections colonists made between aesthetics, health and conservation and, not least, demonstrate the need for environmental historians to study urban environments alongside rural ones.

Question 40

Ecology and Power

Answer 40

19th Century: innovations in transport and communications, industrialisation and new tech, lower shipping costs, military and medical advances.

Question 41

Cotton

Answer 41

• European mill owners were never able to acquire adequate supplies of raw cotton solely through the mechanisms of free trade. As a general rule, rural populations were wary of devoting more than a small proportion of their land and labour to export crops, preferring instead to place their own needs for food and fibre above the demands of markets. This is why, during the first half of the nineteenth century, European manufacturers depended mainly on cotton produced by slaves or indentured labourers who had no control over what they grew.
• 1800-1914 - cotton consumption rises by a factor of 25.
• Because of the energy loss (p.28) associated with the conversion of grass into animal hair, wool required around twelve times more land than cotton to produce the same amount of fibre.
• When the outbreak of the Civil War and the Union blockade of Confederate ports severed this vital supply chain, it sent shockwaves through European markets. Between 1859/60 (a bumper year for Southern producers) and 1861/2, exports dropped from 3.5 million bales to a mere 10,000.
• As European stockpiles dwindled, mills worked on short time or closed altogether, causing huge losses for manufacturers, throwing hundreds of thousands out of work, and touching off a series of violent disturbances in several of Europe’s textile centres.
• As The Times of London put it, ‘No crisis in modern times has been so anxiously watched, nor has any European war or revolution so seriously threatened the interests of England.
• The overwhelming reliance on American cotton and the potentially dire effects of a prolonged shortage made the ‘cotton famine’ a matter of the utmost strategic importance.
• India typically steered away from cotton production as prices could fluctuate by up to 70%.
• The growth of colonial cotton thus illustrates a fundamental point: in agrarian societies operating close to subsistence levels, any alteration in the choice of crops or land-use practices carries profound social implications.
• One of the chief casualties was the soil, or more specifically the various fallow systems that had long been employed to maintain fertility.

Question 42

Egypt

Answer 42

• The first Aswan Dam, completed in 1902 to increase the supply of summer water, accelerated the decline in soil fertility by reducing the amount of silt deposited by the annual floods. Over the following years, and especially after the High Dam stopped the flow of silt altogether after 1970, only vast doses of artificial fertilizer could stabilize yields on the depleted soils of the Delta.
• Feeding Europe’s cotton mills thus entailed a lasting withdrawal on nature’s capital, one whose social costs were mostly borne by ordinary farmers, past, present, and future. As forests were cleared, rivers harnessed, and soils depleted, millions who planted cotton in an attempt to boost their incomes and improve their lives eventually found themselves working harder to survive and paying for things that used to be freely available.
• Throughout the colonial era, Egypt alone produced more cotton than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined, accounting for over 95 per cent of African exports before 1914 and over three-quarters at the end of the 1920s.
• The story of colonial cotton was, above all else, a story of exploitation—of land, water, soils, and people. In many respects it epitomized the fundamental dynamics of imperialism, whose underlying purpose was to maximize the gains from the resources and labour of subjugated territories.

Question 43

Cocoa

Answer 43

• Explosion in 1880s - due partly due to the expansion of global transport and rising purchasing power in Europe, and partly to a string of confectionary innovations that transformed it from liquid to solid.
• The rise of the Gold Coast into the world’s dominant cocoa producer is widely regarded as one of the most spectacular commodity booms in the history of tropical agriculture. Although cocoa exports only began in 1891, within two decades they reached 40,000 tons, making the colony the world’s largest producer. Growth thereafter was meteoric: exports exceeded 200,000 tons in 1923 and 300,000 in the mid-1930s.

Question 44

Rubber

Answer 44

• From the 1900s to the 1930s, millions of hectares of some of the world’s richest Dipterocarp rainforests were replaced by Hevea trees as waves of European planters were attracted by the promise of cheap land and big profits.
• Brazil - 90% production by 1900.
• 1920s - Ford attempted to establish concentrated Hevea stands in Pará - Fordlandia estate proved no match for humble fungus.

Question 45

Oil

Answer 45

• Dutch exploration of Borneo - 1840s. 1896 - Shell finds adequate funding for commercial exploration
• British naval experiments with oil began with HMS Hannibal, 1896. Unsuccessful. Delayed British transition from coal to oil by a decade.
• WWI - Continental blockade important at cutting off Central Power access to oil
• APOC - 1919-24: workforce triples in size - led to construction of town in desert. To supply the town, 2,500km of roads, light railway, moveable pump house and electrical station
• Trinidad
• Drilling into oil formations was especially hazardous on Trinidad, where the problem of high pressure was amplified by the loose, sandy substrata sitting atop the main reservoirs.
• In 1913, when drillers at the Morne L’Enfer No. 4 well hit the high-pressure oil-sands, the resulting eruption blew drilling cable, tools, sand, and oil 30 metres into the air before sending an estimated 200,000 barrels streaming downhill over the next three days.
• Overall, around 100,000 barrels (p.228) of oil were incinerated in this single incident. According to an eyewitness the ‘fried alligators and fishes attracted the vultures from as far away as Port of Spain’, and the soot from the blaze harmed flowering trees over 10 kilometres away.
• Eastern Borneo - 1918 - highly polluted, charred and degraded.
• Europe’s tropical colonies played a central role in the rise of modern nature conservation more generally. Although this initially had much more to do with concerns about resource availability than with a budding ‘environmentalist’ consciousness, many of the world’s earliest and most far-reaching protection measures were developed there.

Question 46

Game Protection

Answer 46

• Earliest legislation - Forest Act 1787
• 1912 Wild Birds and Animals Protection Act - standardise regional legislation
• In the mid-1890s Dutch naturalists urged the government in Batavia to prevent the further slaughter of such striking animals. Bird protection played a key role in the rise of nature preservation more broadly in the Dutch East Indies, where the Nederlandsch-Indische Vereeniging tot Natuurbescherming, founded in 1912, adopted the Bird of Paradise as its logo.
• Cape’s ivory exports -> 26,480 kg in 1861 to a peak of 73,200 kg in 1876, followed by a steep decline to only 4,659 by 1882.
• First ever ‘international’ environmental conference - 1900 Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals - prime example of ‘imperial internationalism’, an attempt to realise colonial aims via closer trans-imperial cooperation.
• Encompassing all of Africa’s major colonial powers, its basic aim was to establish a uniform set of game regulations between the twentieth parallels north and south of the equator, including gradated lists of protected species, licensing, closed seasons, as well as common tariffs and controls on traded animal carcasses or parts.

Question 47

Colonial Forests

Answer 47

• Far from being genuinely ‘untouched’, most of the forests of colonial Asia had, to varying degrees, been shaped by human hand long before Europeans arrived.
• The greatest impacts arose from the expansion of indigenous agriculture, and especially the widespread practice of burning to clear land for temporary rice cultivation or grazing. Itinerant farmers regularly moved from place to place as the soils of their clearings were depleted, usually every one to three years depending on the quality of the land. All but the very largest trees were felled and burned in the process.
• Hochwald - High Forest - German-speaking states of central Europe, bereft of overseas colonies and largely reliant on their own wood resources, that foresters first developed systems of long-term rotation designed to maximize yields of timber and firewood, usually through (p.283) the creation of fast-growing softwood monocultures.
• Annexation Model: The Indian Forests Act of 1878, which subsequently served as a legislative reference point throughout the British Empire, established three basic categories of woodland:
• Reserved forests, which were placed under close state control and were managed for long-term exploitation;
• Protected forests, which allowed limited rights for grazing and collecting various forest products; and
• Village forests, where customary access rights were generally maintained (but which were relatively rare compared to the other two categories).
• German East Africa: Forest administration controversial. The Crown Land Ordinance of 1895 established the basic legal framework by declaring all supposedly unused land to be state domain. In 1904 it was followed by a Forest Protection Ordinance that empowered the colonial government to expel inhabitants from newly created reserves, which was one of the many grievances that eventually sparked the Maji-Maji rebellion the following year.
• Africa: During the 1920s and 1930s research on African soils, crops, and farming methods became much more extensive and systematic.
• One of the earliest and most extensive surveys of African agriculture was carried out in 1919–20 by the ecologist Homer Shantz, an official with the USDA and a former student of Frederick Clements.
• Although it did not include an explicit discussion of indigenous cultivation techniques, Shantz nonetheless studied them closely while conducting his fieldwork in Africa, and found much to admire. Their skill in matching crops to different soil and moisture conditions led Shantz to conclude that, contrary to widespread assumptions, ‘the Native is an excellent agriculturalist’. Just over a decade later, a ground-breaking ‘ecological survey’ in Northern Rhodesia emphatically confirmed Shantz’s portrayal of African agricultural skill. It found that African farmers possessed a detailed knowledge of the connections between vegetation cover and soil fertility, and that the cultivation techniques they deployed were, for the most part, highly appropriate.

Question 48

Madeira

Answer 48

• Settlers found a lush vegetation: “there was not a foot of ground that w as not entirely covered with great trees,” hence the name given to it, madeira, meaning “wood.”
• Despairing of their ability to clear enough land in time to get in food crops and sugar, they set fire to the forest.
• In subsequent years, lumbering for the highly prized furniture timbers went hand in hand with sugar cultivation.

Question 49

USA

Answer 49

• New York, which had a population of 79,000 in 1 800, grew to 696,000 in 1850 and 2.5 million in 1 890. The only other possible solution to the dearth of fuel was more efficient heating. Wide, open, roaring hearth fires lost nine-tenths of their heat up the chimney, so their replacement by more efficient enclosed stoves was advocated for heating homes.
• In 1865 there were 560 iron furnaces, of which 439, or 78 percent, were still fuelled by charcoal.
• The railroad in particular, that actual and symbolic agent of change and modernisation, was a voracious devourer of forests. In 1 866 Andrew Fuller had noted that: “even where railroads have penetrated regions abundantly supplied, we soon find all along its track timber becomes scarce. For every railroad in the country requires a continued forest from one end to the other of its line to supply it with ties , fuel, and lumber for building cars”
• The heady boom of cutting the huge stands of the much-prized white pine in the Great Lakes states doubled lumber production from about 4 billion bf (9.4 million m3) annually in 1870 to over 9 billion bf ( 2 1 .3 million m3) in 1890, only to fall from then on to a mere 1 billion bf (2.4 million m3) by 1920.

Question 50

What is the difference between trade and commerce in the eyes of Carey?

Answer 50

Trade is exploitative, commerce is benign

Question 51

What is the Waring system?

Answer 51

Separated rainwater from urban sewers.

Question 52

What is new imperialism?

Answer 52

‘new imperialism’ coincided very closely with the rapid expansion of communications and commercial entertainments (mass-circulation papers, cinema, urban leisure industries) that helped to assemble and popularise such stereotypes.

Question 53

Evidence stadial/ stage theory

Answer 53

The vocabulary is revealing: the ‘primeval’ forests in Sumatra or the ‘aboriginal’ herds in East Africa were perceived not merely as different geographic environments, but as throwbacks to an earlier stage of history before the advent of civilisation.

Question 54

Evidence moral interaction with colonial subjects

Answer 54

• Africans: Should be treated with moderation - without ‘the criminal abuses exceedingly employed’ by the majority of slave owners - receiving instruction about religion and marriage (so that they ‘would not continue with crimes and excesses of sensual passions’). They should also be allowed one day per week to work for their own subsistence (instead of spending Sundays ‘drunken and indulging in the vices typical of their natural weakness’). This policy of ‘good morals and provident economy’ would make the slaves ‘more loyal to and more friendly with their masters’
• Indians: it was necessary ‘to civilise them and save their souls’

Question 55

Michael Perelman - Economist

Answer 55

• Argues that Henry Carey was the pioneer of environmental economics.
• Carey’s vision of the future was a capitalist vision, but one in which the distance between capitalist and worker was held to a minimum.

Question 56

Morrison - Economist

Answer 56

• Carey’s understanding of commerce “related to Eighteenth Century French meaning of an ideal ensemble of social relations which arise when exchange is carried on within a given geographical region”.

Question 57

Lauren Hollsten - Colonialism

Answer 57

17thc. Caribbean: Sugar plantations. Major ecosystem upheaval. Identifies severe social and ecological disruption caused by European intervention into the region for sugar production.

Question 58

Simmonds - Manure

Answer 58

• Exploration of the adoption of manuring in urban environments as a form of Romantic anticapitalist political machination.
• French chemists in this period invented a cosmology of nature as the great recycler - seeing animal emissions as one end of an ever-renewing cycle. Inspired by physiocratic tradition.
• Manure offered the key to total and perpetual autarky and a scientific solution to the plagues of poverty and inequality. Excrement emerged in this period as the centre point of a brand of French anti-capitalism.

Question 59

Goddard - Manure

Answer 59

• There appeared therefore to be an affinity of interest between town and country in the economic aspects of the “Sewage Question” because of the promise that the sale of sewage would generate income to pay for urban infrastructure improvement, help to reduce water pollution and save on the cost of food production.
• The Victorian debate on the “Sewage Question” was articulated very largely in economic terms; a technical solution to the sanitary and environmental problems of sewage purification was available at the end of the nineteenth century.

Question 60

Foster - Waring

Answer 60

• George Waring highlighted the deficiencies present in the 1850 US Census.
• Waring - describing Liebig, he ‘has been ascribing the downfall of empires to the pouring of those wastes into the sea’
• Waring claimed that the census provides no direct information on “the amount of inherent fertilizing matter removed from the soil by the production and ordinary use of crops”. The agricultural features of the census insisted on the need to calculate not only economic production in agriculture but also the ecological losses to the soil; that is, the true condition of agriculture.

Question 61

Charles-Francois Mathis

Answer 61

• Agitation around development on Thirlmere and Fontainebleau. Locals did not want sites of Romanticism and mystification to be tampered with.
• Despite similar trends leading to landscape appreciation in the 1830s and 1840s, only England managed to define a particular English landscape, while France could not find one national identifying landscape.

Question 62

John Tully

Answer 62

• Gum “was obtained by profligate, inefficient, and ultimately unsustainable methods of extraction, which killed the trees in the process. The imperial authorities and the telegraph companies gave little thought to the future of a precious finite resource: it was merely one more tropical commodity to be ruthlessly exploited”
• Without this immense girdle of telegraph wires radiating from London, the administration and defense of the “Empire on which the sun never sets” would have been problematic and “imperial overstretch” a distinct possibility: if London were the brain of the Empire, the telegraph cables were its nerves, connected to thousands of sensitive eyes and ears.

Question 63

Jose Padua

Answer 63

• Commenting on Brazilian intellectuals in the 18/9th century.
• From 1786 until 1888, at least 38 Brazilian authors wrote regularly about these problems [environmental destruction], referring to socially negative consequences emergent from this damage.
• In the particular case of Brazil, contrary to the views that tried to link the origins of environmentalism with the Romantic culture, the natural environment was first defended, sometimes heroically, by pragmatic and utilitarian intellectuals.
• Portuguese interaction with natives was purely out of self interest - “The reduction of violence against Africans and Indians was a political and economic necessity.

Question 64

Richard Tucker

Answer 64

• The appetites of affluent Europeans and then Americans provided the engine of consumption that pulled tropical resources north.

Question 65

Richard Grove

Answer 65

• The Edenic, Romantic and physiocratic roots of environmentalism on Mauritius and in the Caribbean and India were strongly reinforced after 1820 by the writings of Alexander von Humboldt.
• Ideological content of colonial policy was informed by Romantic, Orientlaist and other elements.
• “The landscapes of island and garden were metaphors of mind. Anxieties about environmental change, climatic change and extinctions and even fear of famine, all of which helped to motivate early environmentalism, mirrored anxiety about social form (especially where the fragile identity of the European colonist was called into question) and motivated social reform… concern about climactic change, for example, is not simply fear of the effect of man on the environment. Far more the underlying fear is one related to the integrity and physical survival of people themselves.
• Soon after 1492, the impact of the New World had a strong impact on the image of the Renaissance man.
• the formulation of the well-documented response by colonial officials to the ecological deterioration of St Helena and the Cape Colony marked a major turning point in European culture as a Utopian aesthetic discourse was transformed into a far-reaching change in attitudes towards European-caused degradation of tropical forests and soils.
• Colonial environmental policies arose, therefore, between 1650 and 1850, as a product of highly structured tensions between colonial periphery and metropolitan centre and between the insecure colonial state and the climatic environmentalism of the new scientific conservation elites.

Question 66

James Beattie

Answer 66

• Colonial anxiety emerged from the nonconformity of exotic lands to operate according to European normative model of the environment. In particular, scientists and medics were the major proponents of environmental concern and regulation, with anti-colonial sentiment emerging from their ranks.
• European perceptions of existing environments reveal that existing anxieties about human-induced climate change, soil erosion and a looming timber famine caused by large-scale deforestation occupied the minds of colonial planners throughout Australasia and Asia.
• Over the course of the 19th c and into the next, Europeans expressed markedly less confidence that they could acclimatise to climates dissimilar to their own.
• Scottish forestry management looked unscientific and unsophisticated compared to European efforts - especially forstwissenschaft (forestry science)
• Ecology encouraged fears about soil erosion and flooding because it emphasised the inter-relationship of environmental change and disturbance.

Question 67

Corey Ross

Answer 67

• At the heart of European imperialism was an attempt to transform forests, savannahs, rivers, coastal plains, and deserts into productive and legible spaces, all of which brought hefty environmental consequences: deforestation, erosion, siltation, pollution, disease, and habitat destruction.
• European imperialism thus engendered not only new ways to exploit the physical environment, but also new anxieties about the human impact on the rest of nature.
• At the same time, the benefits of such changes were also concentrated through the mechanisms of unequal exchange, which functioned on an ecological as well as an economic level. By and large, the net flow of resources (energy, minerals, nutrients, fertility) worked very much in favour of the metropoles over their colonial suppliers.
• In many respects, then, the advent of European rule did not mark the neat ecological caesura that some accounts have suggested. As recent scholarship has shown, it is simply inappropriate to demarcate a long pre-colonial era of harmony between human needs and forests from a subsequent period of rapid depletion and social exclusion.
• On a global scale, the net flow of resources from the colonies to the metropoles degraded tropical ecosystems, diverted wealth from subject peoples, and skewed their economies for decades to come.
• Colonial intervention and commercial penetration caused widespread destruction in many parts of the tropics, as the chapters in this book clearly attest. But if this interpretation has the virtue of simplicity, it fails to account for the multidimensionality of the changes that took place. For one thing, the colonial powers rarely if ever occupied landscapes that had not already been shaped by human hand. Most of the environments they conquered had long been the object of competing claims among indigenous groups or between locals and expansionist outsider states, all of whom altered, improved, and degraded the landscape through their various activities. In most areas, imperial conquest did not initiate a process of anthropogenic change so much as perpetuate and often magnify existing strategies of human use, not least through the ability to apply greater amounts of capital, resources, and technology to the penetration and control of spaces that local rulers had never managed to dominate.
• In a long-term perspective, the colonial period was not entirely distinct from what preceded it, and it differed even less from what followed.

Question 68

Mary Louise Pratt

Answer 68

• Colonial plantations represented ‘contact zones’ between different peoples, animals and plants. Within a few decades, the islands were ‘transformed’ by “European consumption”.

Question 69

Daniel Headrick

Answer 69

• (Tentacles of Progress) “Like other inventions, [the telegraph] . . . was also an instrument of power, so it is not surprising to find it intertwined with the power struggles of the time: private enterprise and governments; the domination of the Western nations over the non-Western world; and, as the nineteenth century gave over to the twentieth, the growing rivalries between the nations of the West which led to two world wars”

Question 70

Tony Ballantyne

Answer 70

• ‘Webs of empire’ - like a spider’s web, connections were constantly broken and reformed across empire.

Question 71

John M Mackenzie

Answer 71

Pioneered imperial environmental history.

Question 72

Alfred Crosby

Answer 72

• “It was their germs, not the imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover.”