Eco-cultural networks and the British empire is a persuasive anthology, and a worthy addition to the growing canon of scholarship directed at expressing histories of geographical and lived environments, and of the British empire in more transnational and global terms. To that end, the authors introduce the concept of ‘eco-cultural networks’ to explore the impact of the British empire on environments both within and beyond its formal boundaries.
The volume is divided into two parts – ‘Regional eco-cultural networks’ and ‘Local eco-cultural networks’ – and consists of eleven essays which aim to examine, as the editors state in the introductory chapter, ‘the pathways of trade, conquest and governance … to highlight the deep dependencies between societies and their environments’ as the products of eco-cultural networks (p. 3). The editors claim to have located a gap in knowledge where historians have failed to acknowledge the importance of environmental factors in the creation of lived spaces in the colonial and imperial sphere. The purpose, as they state, is not to offer a ‘synthetic history’, but instead to present new vantage points that highlight points of connection between a global narrative of networks and the history of the British empire set among its diverse environs.
The editors’ introductory chapter, alongside Chapter 2, ‘Climate and empire’, by Georgina Endfield and Samuel Randalls, establishes the theoretical framework for the volume. Whereas the editors delineate the book’s intentions, Chapter 2 provides an analysis of the authors’ interpretation of the potent subtext at the core of environmental discourse, stating that the environment should be considered ‘a philosophical and political category as much as it is a material category, one that was deployed by a diversity of actors in changing and sometimes conflicting ways’ (p. 21). The framework they cultivate examines several key factors, including: ‘imperial ambitions for environmental control’; the use of ‘climatic factors to explain away political or economic failings by imperial authorities’; and ‘the development and legitimation of particular forms of climate knowledge’ (p. 21).
While the term ‘eco-cultural networks’ is a welcome addition to the lexicon of environmental and global historiography, a number of problems become apparent in the editors’ introductory chapter. Their argument that a gap exists where historians of the British empire have failed to acknowledge the environmental factors inherent in the ‘creation, maintenance and eventual decline of imperial power’ (p. 4) simply does not withstand scrutiny. James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth (2009) gives a convincing account of the environmental limitations faced by settlers of the ‘Wests’ in the ‘Anglo World’. Sarah Easterby-Smith has accounted for the flow of flora through global networks within and beyond the empires of France and Britain. And multiple works have focused on the devastating environmental impact of administrative mismanagement of land after the Grant of the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa to the East India Company in 1765. Nor do any of the contributors to this volume interrogate the editors’ claim that the environment played a critical role in the decline of imperial power. Despite this criticism, it is certainly the case that environmental history remains a marginal topic in global and imperial history, if not an emerging one.
The problem facing the way in which this volume is structured is not in the content or quality of its essays – which are remarkably well written – but with the claim that Part 1 departs from Part 2, from regional to local perspectives on eco-cultural networks. In fact, both sections adeptly capture transregional, transnational, and/or global eco-cultural networks within their narrative. For example, Chapter 3, ‘The Chinese state and agriculture in an age of global empires’, by Joseph Lawson, examines problems of scale in colonization or settlement of uncultivated regions in China. Using cogent, discreet, region-by-region statistics, Lawson illustrates how eco-cultural networks of knowledge, people, and genetic material penetrated Chinese agronomy in the nineteenth century. Similarly, in Chapter 10, ‘Experiments, environments, and networks: commercial rice cultivation in south-eastern Australia, 1900–1945’, in Part 2 of the volume, Emily O’Gorman explores the agronomic journey made by south-eastern Australia, from the creation of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) to becoming a gross contributor to the international production and export of rice. O’Gorman’s compelling account of Australia’s emergence as a rice-producing nation accounts for both the inward transfer of knowledge and organic material from Japan and California that precipitated the MIA’s success, and its environmental impact on the availability of water.
The criticism of the volume’s structure should not detract from its overall value as a contribution to the fields of environmental, global, and imperial history, which is substantial. Its strength lies in the many vantage points promised and delivered by its editors. Chapter 4, ‘Empire in a cup: imagining colonial geographies through British tea consumption’, by Melillo, and Chapter 6, ‘Peradeniya and the plantation Raj in nineteenth-century Ceylon’, by Eugenia W. Herbert, both explore the growth of Ceylon as a centre of tea production in the British empire from different and unique perspectives. Melillo examines the growth of Lipton as a corporate and household entity, focusing on the pioneering marketing strategies – playing on the imaginations of consumers – that twinned bucolic panoramas of Ceylon’s tea plantations with innovative slogans representing the freshness of their product: ‘Direct from the Tea Garden to the teapot!’ (p. 68). Herbert, in contrast, tells the story of colonial Ceylon’s journey from struggling colony – failure to cultivate cash crops, a volatile and competitive global market, and the crop monoculture that resulted in coffee blight – to tea-producing giant. Her narrative tells the story of the Royal Botanical Garden at Peradeniya and its eccentric but brilliant superintendent, G. H. K. Thwaites, who had a profound impact on Ceylon’s tea economy. Through this, she provides an authoritative account of Ceylon’s dramatic environmental transformation – a victim of its own economic success – through land clearance for tea cultivation, and the construction of roads and rail for the transportation of its produce.
Chapter 5, ‘Africa, Europe and the birds between them’, is particularly worthy of note for emphasizing the potential disconnectedness that can exist within eco-cultural networks – in effect, places connected only by the life that migrates between them. Nancy J. Jacobs looks at intercontinental bird migration between Europe and Africa, and examines how new knowledge evolved from the local to global through the study of avian migration patterns; how this influenced European perceptions of their own migrations to Africa; and how avian migration affected the imaginations of those at the southern end of the journey.
Last comes the essential question of how effectively the book achieves what it sets out to do, specifically providing a transnational history of the British empire’s impact on the environments within and beyond its frontier, and offering a vehicle for the introduction of ‘eco-cultural networks’ into our jargon. It is a testament to the editors that their endeavour has translated into a volume of essays as diverse and complex as the environs, economies, and peoples of the British empire and its regional neighbours, the success of which is the emergence of an eco-cultural, network-centric world within the pages of the book.
