Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Studies in Environment and History): Richard H. Grove

Green Imperialism is the first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, concentrating especially on its hitherto unexplained colonial and global aspects. It highlights the significance of Utopian, Physiocratic, and medical thinking in the history of environmentalist ideas.

The book shows how the new critique of the colonial impact on the environment depended on the emergence of a coterie of professional scientists, and demonstrates both the importance of the oceanic island “Eden” as a vehicle for new conceptions of nature and the significance of colonial island environments in stimulating conservationist notions.

• Series: Studies in Environment and History
• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; Edition Unstated edition (November 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521565138
• ISBN-13: 978-0521565134
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches

Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire: Driver, Felix

Geography Militant is a compelling account of the relations between geographical knowledge, exploration, and empire. This book traces the emergence of a modern culture of exploration, as reflected in the role of institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society and the reputation of explorers such as Livingstone and Stanley. The production and dissemination of geographical knowledge in the age of empire involved much more than the collection of new facts: it required the mobilization of a wide range of material and imaginative resources.

Geography Militant pays particular attention to the contradictory and contested nature of geography, unraveling contemporary debates over the status of fieldwork, the ethics of exploration and the relations between science and sensationalism. These issues are of more than historical interest, as the culture of Geography Militant continually regenerates itself in the worlds of advertising, tourism and heritage. This engaging book will be of interest to scholars and students in Geography, History, Literature, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and the History of Science.

• Hardcover: 268 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (October 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631201114
• ISBN-13: 978-0631201113
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches

Roman Geographies of the Nile: From the Late Republic to the Early Empire: Merrills, Andy

The River Nile fascinated the Romans and appeared in maps, written descriptions, texts, poems and paintings of the developing empire. Tantalised by the unique status of the river, explorers were sent to find the sources of the Nile, while natural philosophers meditated on its deeper metaphysical significance. Andy Merrills’ book, Roman Geographies of the Nile, examines the very different images of the river that emerged from these descriptions – from anthropomorphic figures, brought repeatedly into Rome in military triumphs, through the frequently whimsical landscape vignettes from the houses of Pompeii, to the limitless river that spilled through the pages of Lucan’s Civil War, and symbolised a conflict – and an empire – without end. Considering cultural and political contexts alongside the other Niles that flowed through the Roman world in this period, this book provides a wholly original interpretation of the deeper significance of geographical knowledge during the later Roman Republic and early Principate.

Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies c.1880–1960 (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (Series Number 42)) Robin A.Butlin

How did the major European imperial powers and indigenous populations experience imperialism and colonisation in the period 1880-1960? In this richly-illustrated comparative account, Robin Butlin provides a comprehensive overview of the experiences of individual European imperial powers – British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, German and Italian – and the reactions of indigenous peoples. He explores the complex processes and discourses of colonialism, conquest and resistance from the height of empire through to decolonisation and sets these within the dynamics of the globalisation of political and economic power systems. He sheds new light on variations in the timing, nature and locations of European colonisations and on key themes such as exploration and geographical knowledge; maps and mapping; demographics; land seizure and environmental modification; transport and communications; and resistance and independence movements. In so doing, he makes a major contribution to our understanding of colonisation and the end of empire.

 

• Series: Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (Series Number 42) (Book 42)
• Paperback: 692 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; Illustrated edition (July 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 052174055X
• ISBN-13: 978-0521740555
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 1.6 x 9.7 inches

 

Fresh Pond: The History of a Cambridge Landscape Sinclair, Jill

Fresh Pond Reservation, at the northwest edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been described as a “landscape loved to death.” Certainly it is a landscape that has been changed by its various uses over the years and one to which Cantabridgeans and Bostonians have felt an intense attachment. Henry James returned to it in his sixties, looking for “some echo of the dreams of youth,” feeling keenly “the pleasure of memory”; a Harvard student of the 1850s fondly remembered skating parties and the chance of “flirtation with some fair-ankled beauty of breezy Boston”; modern residents argue fiercely over dogs being allowed to run free at the reservation and whether soccer or nature is a more valuable experience for Cambridge schoolchildren.

In Fresh Pond, Jill Sinclair tells the story of the pond and its surrounding land through photographs, drawings, maps, plans, and an engaging narrative of the pond’s geological, historical, and political ecology. Fresh Pond has been a Native American hunting and fishing ground; the site of an eighteenth-century hotel offering bowling, food and wine, and impromptu performances by Harvard men; a summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians; a training ground for trench warfare; a location for picnics and festivals for workers and sporting activities for all. The parkland features an Olmsted design, albeit an imperfectly realized one. The pond itself―a natural lake carved out by the retreating Ice Age about 15,000 years ago―was a center of the nineteenth-century ice industry (disparaged by Thoreau, writing about another pond), and still supplies the city of Cambridge with fresh drinking water.

Sinclair’s celebration of a local landscape also alerts us to broader issues―shifts in public attitudes toward nature (is it brutal wilderness or in need of protection?) and water (precious commodity or limitless flow?)―that resonate as we remake our relationship to the landscape.

Review

“Jill Sinclair has written a wonderful account of Cambridge’s most prominent natural feature, Fresh Pond, so aptly named by the colonists who noted its connection to the tidal waters of Alewife Brook. After centuries as a venue for fishing and fowling, the pond became at once a pleasure ground for Bostonians, a prolific source of ice for export to world markets, and a public water supply. Engineers tried to tame Fresh Pond into a reservoir at the same time that Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. and Jr. were hired to enhance the surrounding landscape as a public park, which Harvard students turned into a miniature Western Front as they trained for World War I. Sinclair explores these and many other aspects of Fresh Pond’s history with amazing skill.”–Charles M. Sullivan, Executive Director, Cambridge Historical Commission

“Sinclair’s richly illustrated study traces the shifting cultural meaning of Cambridge’s most important public landscape through generations of use and abuse. Well researched and eloquently written, this is landscape history at its best.”–Robin Karson, author of “A Genius for Place”

“We have all witnessed the excitement that comes when a forgotten building, painting, or sculpture is attributed to a celebrated artist. Chronicled through the lens of a community-based planning process, “Fresh Pond” celebrates the rich and historically significant story of Fresh Pond. Jill Sinclair’s book not only illustrates why Cambridge, Massachusetts, residents love it to death, but it also makes the case for this forgotten work of the Olmsted firm so that it may take its rightful place alongside the nearly 200 other Olmsted-designed landscapes across America recognized on the National Register of Historic Places.”–Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, Founder and President, The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Review

Jill Sinclair has written a wonderful account of Cambridge’s most prominent natural feature, Fresh Pond, so aptly named by the colonists who noted its connection to the tidal waters of Alewife Brook. After centuries as a venue for fishing and fowling, the pond became at once a pleasure ground for Bostonians, a prolific source of ice for export to world markets, and a public water supply. Engineers tried to tame Fresh Pond into a reservoir at the same time that Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. and Jr. were hired to enhance the surrounding landscape as a public park, which Harvard students turned into a miniature Western Front as they trained for World War I. Sinclair explores these and many other aspects of Fresh Pond’s history with amazing skill.

―Charles M. Sullivan, Executive Director, Cambridge Historical Commission

Jill Sinclair is a landscape historian, writer, and lecturer now living in Paris.

 

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (February 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262195917
• ISBN-13: 978-0262195911
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 1.1 x 7.5 inches

 

Mapping the Ottomans: Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Brummett, Palmira

https://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Ottomans-Sovereignty-Territory-Mediterranean/dp/1107090776/ref=ecoethicA/

Simple paradigms of Muslim-Christian confrontation and the rise of Europe in the seventeenth century do not suffice to explain the ways in which European mapping envisioned the “Turks” in image and narrative. Rather, maps, travel accounts, compendia of knowledge, and other texts created a picture of the Ottoman Empire through a complex layering of history, ethnography, and eyewitness testimony, which juxtaposed current events to classical and biblical history; counted space in terms of peoples, routes, and fortresses; and used the land and seascapes of the map to assert ownership, declare victory, and embody imperial power’s reach. Enriched throughout by examples of Ottoman self-mapping, this book examines how Ottomans and their empire were mapped in the narrative and visual imagination of early modern Europe’s Christian kingdoms. The maps serve as centerpieces for discussions of early modern space, time, borders, stages of travel, information flows, invocations of authority, and cross-cultural relations.

Review

“In this well-documented and richly illustrated narrative, Palmira Brummett envisions the European obsession with the Turk as an imagined space serving as a canvas for the sacred, warlike and quotidian impressions of historians and travelers alike. Tracing the accumulation of a remarkable body of information, Brummett describes the production of a chain of authorities, ancient and contemporary, in the cultural construction of pre-1800 Europe.”
Virginia Aksan, McMaster University, Ontario

“Mapping the Ottomans is the triumphant conclusion of Palmira Brummett’s innovative work on the early modern Ottoman Empire over more than three decades. I have no doubt that as both a model of scholarship and a passionately engaged critique of many of the west’s assumptions about early Islamic empires, Brummett’s book will come to redefine the next generation’s approach to the study of the Ottomans. Anyone interested in our current geopolitical dilemmas should read it.”
Jerry Brotton, Queen Mary, University of London, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps

“Moving beyond the simple cataloguing of European images of the Ottoman other that has characterized previous scholarship, Palmira Brummett shows the nuanced and diverse range of European responses to the Ottomans, as well as illustrating Ottoman self-mapping practices and the ways in which both emerged from a set of shared precedents and fit into a common early modern cartographic culture. Mapping the Ottomans is an essential addition to the rich body of literature on early modern maps, as well as to our growing understanding of the complex and interconnected character of early modern European and the Mediterranean worlds.”
Eric Dursteler, Brigham Young University

“This lavishly illustrated volume opens up the world of European perceptions, portrayal and cultural imagination of the Ottomans. Breaking away from the religious divide and military enemy motifs, Palmira Brummett presents a much more realistic and complex vision of osmosis, permeability, and shared societies in a book which is a true pleasure to read.”
Kate Fleet, Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies and Fellow of Newnham College, University of Cambridge

“Palmira Brummett’s nuanced account goes well beyond cartography to provide a rich history of how Western Europe viewed Ottoman space. This illuminating study demonstrates how texts and maps together shaped an imaginary of the borderlines between Asia and Europe, Islam, and Christianity. Brummett’s focus on perceptions of space renders the maps she discusses as richly layered and interconnected objects, fully embedded in broader rhetorical, iconographic, and historiographic traditions.”
Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles

‘In this comprehensive study of written and pictorial descriptions of the Ottoman state and its borderlands, Palmira Brummett gathers several of the most important strands of recent scholarship on the early modern world. This authoritative book is characterized by increasing recognition of the enmeshment of material and intellectual cultures in Christian and Muslim lands, reconfiguration of knowledge of the ‘east’ that eschews the stultifying rubric of orientalism, and reliance on maps as historical archives and powerful metaphors for picturing spaces and their inhabitants.’ Sean Roberts, American Historical Review

Book Description

Maps serve as centerpieces for discussions of early modern space, time, borders, stages of travel, information flows, invocations of authority, and cross-cultural relations. Enriched by examples of Ottoman self-mapping, this book examines how the Ottoman Empire was mapped in the narrative and visual imagination of early modern Europe’s Christian kingdoms.

• Hardcover: 398 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (May 19, 2015)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1107090776
• ISBN-13: 978-1107090774
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 1.1 x 10.3 inches

Early Mapping of Southeast Asia: The Epic Story of Seafarers, Adventurers, and Cartographers Who First Mapped the Regions between China and India: Suarez, Thomas:

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Mapping-Southeast-Asia-Cartographers/dp/9625934707/ref=ecoethicA/

Early Mapping of Southeast Asia follows the story of mapmaking, exploration and colonization in Asia from the 16th to the 19th centuries. It surveys Southeast Asia’s geography and civilizations, its maps and their influence on Western worldviews, as well as the image of Southeast Asia in the eyes of its neighbors.

Map expert Su rez (Shedding the Veil), who has served as a curator for map exhibits at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, has assembled a fascinating corpus of period maps to illustrate the use of cartography by Europeans in their exploration, interpretation, and subsequent colonization of Southeast Asia from the 16th to the 19th centuries. For the purpose of this study, Southeast Asia is defined as mainland areas east of the Ganges River, through Burma, Thailand, Indochina, and the Malay Peninsula as well as the insular region from the Nicobar and Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The authoritative text includes informative references to notable cartographers and explorers readily accessible through the index. Although the emphasis is on European maps, one chapter is entirely devoted to Asian maps of Southeast Asia. This unusual but handsome resource (of the 120 illustrations, 50 are reproduced in full color) is recommended for all public and academic libraries, particularly those with extensive cartographic or Asian history collections.
-Edward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Pierce, FL

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Periplus Editions; 1st edition (November 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9625934707
• ISBN-13: 978-9625934709
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 1.1 x 12 inches

Fresh Pond: The History of a Cambridge Landscape : Sinclair, Jill

https://www.amazon.com/Fresh-Pond-History-Cambridge-Landscape/dp/0262195917/ref=ecoethicA/

The history of Fresh Pond Reservation―onetime summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians, center of the nineteenth-century ice industry, and stomping grounds for Harvard students―told through photographs, maps and plans, and stories.

Fresh Pond Reservation, at the northwest edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been described as a “landscape loved to death.” Certainly it is a landscape that has been changed by its various uses over the years and one to which Cantabridgeans and Bostonians have felt an intense attachment. Henry James returned to it in his sixties, looking for “some echo of the dreams of youth,” feeling keenly “the pleasure of memory”; a Harvard student of the 1850s fondly remembered skating parties and the chance of “flirtation with some fair-ankled beauty of breezy Boston”; modern residents argue fiercely over dogs being allowed to run free at the reservation and whether soccer or nature is a more valuable experience for Cambridge schoolchildren.

In Fresh Pond, Jill Sinclair tells the story of the pond and its surrounding land through photographs, drawings, maps, plans, and an engaging narrative of the pond’s geological, historical, and political ecology. Fresh Pond has been a Native American hunting and fishing ground; the site of an eighteenth-century hotel offering bowling, food and wine, and impromptu performances by Harvard men; a summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians; a training ground for trench warfare; a location for picnics and festivals for workers and sporting activities for all. The parkland features an Olmsted design, albeit an imperfectly realized one. The pond itself―a natural lake carved out by the retreating Ice Age about 15,000 years ago―was a center of the nineteenth-century ice industry (disparaged by Thoreau, writing about another pond), and still supplies the city of Cambridge with fresh drinking water.

Sinclair’s celebration of a local landscape also alerts us to broader issues―shifts in public attitudes toward nature (is it brutal wilderness or in need of protection?) and water (precious commodity or limitless flow?)―that resonate as we remake our relationship to the landscape.

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Empires in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean World: Bleda S. Düring, Tesse D. Stek

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial contexts in the ancient world. Bringing together a range of studies by an international team of scholars, the volume shows that empires were dynamic, diverse, and experimental polities, and that their success or failure was determined by a combination of forceful interventions, as well as the new possibilities for those dominated by empires to collaborate and profit from doing so.

By highlighting the processes that occur in rural and peripheral landscapes, the volume demonstrates that the archaeology of these non-urban and literally eccentric spheres can provide an important contribution to our understanding of ancient empires. The ‘bottom up’ approach to the study of ancient empires is crucial to understanding how these remarkable socio-political organisms could exist and persist.

About the Author

Bleda S. Düring is Associate Professor in Near Eastern Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology of Universiteit Leiden. He directed an ERC Starting Grant Research project (2012-2016) on the archaeology of the early Assyrian Empire. He is the author of The Prehistory of Asia Minor (Cambridge, 2010).

Tesse D. Stek is Associate Professor in Mediterranean Archaeology and Head of the World Archaeology Department of the Faculty of Archaeology of Universiteit Leiden. He coordinates the NWO funded research project Landscapes of Early Roman colonization and is the author of Cult places and cultural change in Republican Italy and co-editor of Roman Republican Colonization (2014) and The Impact of Rome on Cult Places and Religious Practices in Ancient Italy (2015).

• Paperback: 386 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (May 7, 2020)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 131663924X
• ISBN-13: 978-1316639245
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.8 x 10 inches

Mediterranean Islands, Fragile Communities and Persistent Landscapes: Antikythera in Long-Term Perspective: Bevan, Andrew, Conolly, James

https://www.amazon.com/Mediterranean-Islands-Communities-Persistent-Landscapes/dp/1107033454/ref=ecoethicA/

Mediterranean landscape ecology, island cultures and long-term human history have all emerged as major research agendas over the past half-century, engaging large swathes of the social and natural sciences. This book brings these traditions together in considering Antikythera, a tiny island perched on the edge of the Aegean and Ionian seas, over the full course of its human history from the Neolithic through the present day. Small islands are particularly interesting because their human, plant, and animal populations often experience abrupt demographic changes, including periods of near-complete abandonment and recolonization, and Antikythera proves to be one of the best-documented examples of these shifts over time. Small islands also play eccentric but revealing roles in wider social, economic, and political networks, serving as places for refugees, hunters, modern eco-tourists, political exiles, hermits, and pirates.

Antikythera is a rare case of an island that has been investigated in its entirety from several systematic fieldwork and disciplinary perspectives, not least of which is an intensive archaeological survey. The authors use the resulting evidence to offer a unique vantage on settlement and land use histories.

• Hardcover: 327 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (May 31, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1107033454
• ISBN-13: 978-1107033450
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 0.8 x 10.2 inches