In a series of brash but hubristic articles in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky declared, on behalf of the Soviet regime, a ‘war to the death’ against nature, arguing that ‘the blind drive of nature to produce on earth every kind of useful or even harmless trash – must be stopped and eradicated’ (cited on p. 288). The belief, as Douglas R. Weiner describes it in one of the most striking of the essays in this wide-ranging volume, that nature could be subdued and transformed by such ‘pharaonic projects’ as the Baltic–White Sea Canal reflected not just the overweening technopolitical ambitions of the Stalinist regime but also the collective mindset of a ‘tribute-taking state’ that stretched back to the very foundations of the Russian state and disastrously persisted into the post-Soviet era. Weiner’s startling, almost apocalyptic, account of Russian environmental history captures one of the several ideas in this book as to what environmental history and its relationship with world history might be about. It is not primarily about untouched ‘nature’, for nothing is pristine here; rather it illuminates the ways in which states and technological elites (there is much here for engineers to reflect on) conceive nature as a resource that exists for them to command and who, in trying to implement such transformative strategies, sacrifice not just plants, animals, and entire ecosystems but, as in the Soviet case, create ecological disasters that undermine human health and imperil once sustainable modes of existence. In Weiner’s chilling take on environmental history, environmental attitudes are deep-rooted in state ambitions and ideologies, just as environmental history gains much of its traction by being a history driven by disaster – as another contributor, Lise Sedrez, remarks with regard to Latin American environmental history, ‘the concept of crisis remains strong’ (p. 262). Since, in our interconnected world, a local crisis such as Chernobyl can readily become global, and Soviet mistakes can presage or exemplify wider patterns of environmental misuse, the environmental history of one region rapidly mutates into world history.

But the understandably alarmist interpretation of environmental history adopted by Weiner is only one of several agendas and strategies espoused in this book. At one level, it aspires to be a textbook of global environmental history today, and part of its value is as a succinct survey of the progress of that history as seen from key regions of the globe – China, the Middle East, Africa, India, Latin America, and Russia – rather than from the North American perspective presumed to be familiar to most readers. Only one of the essays (Mark Cioc’s discussion of the Rhine as a ‘world river’), takes up a European case study, one which effectively draws together political, economic, technological, and ecological factors to explain how, over the past two centuries, the Rhine has been transformed from an eco-rich river to an eco-dead canal. Elsewhere, Sedrez reviews recent literature on environmental history in and of Latin America and its escape from over-simplistic ‘declensionist narratives’ (p. 262). From the perspective of what is now a second or even third generation of environmental historians operating outside Europe and North America, William Beinart writing on Africa and Mahesh Rangarajan on India revisit earlier assumptions about a ‘colonial watershed’ in the environmental history writing of their respective regions, qualifying but not entirely rejecting the extreme claim that colonialism signalled a radical transformation and a flawed understanding or tragic misuse of colonized environments. As in Michael Adas’ brief account of the rice frontier in Southeast Asia or Edmund Burke’s impressive survey of 3,500 years of Middle Eastern environmental history, there is a growing sense of long-term anthropogenic change, reaching back centuries (if not millennia) into the pre-colonial past. And if there remains a sense that colonialism accelerated many undesirable processes of change or fatefully subordinated the environment to new economic and political imperatives, there is also a more positive reading of human ingenuity in devising strategies of environmental adaptation.

Although Beinart reminds us of the value of using cultural sources, including folklore, to enrich environmental history, and Sedrez refers to scholarly interest in the changing idea of nature, there is little sense in the volume as a whole of environmental history as a field of cultural or intellectual enquiry. Nor, despite passing acknowledgement of the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (p. 9), is the population at large given much agency: as Burke puts it, in speaking of the medieval Middle East, ‘rulers make choices’ (p. 91). Apart from Adas, one misses positive engagement with the subaltern perspective adopted by David Ludden twenty years ago in his Peasant history in South India that nomads, peasants, and townspeople also fashion environments and subvert as well as sustain imperial schemes. It is interesting that, apart from Alfred Crosby’s bio-determinism, one of the authors whom contributors invoke is Karl Wittfogel. His specific claims, made half a century ago, for an Oriental Despotism grounded in hydraulic mastery, are summarily rejected (in part as Cold War fantasy); as a way of recognizing the centrality of water in the envi ronmental tyranny exercised by states, however, Wittfogel’s work seems to command a continuing resonance.

Water and state feature prominently in Kenneth Pomeranz’s two essays – one an introduction to the volume as a whole, the other on the transformation of China’s environment between 1500 and 2000. Pomeranz cultivates the idea of a ‘developmentalist project’ as a critical way of framing the environmental history of ‘the last several centuries’ (p. 7) and as a way of situating the environment as a site for innovation needed to overcome the limitations imposed by growing population, seemingly finite resources, and expansionist state systems. This places states and, more especially, economies centre-stage in one version of what environmental history might be: for, as Pomeranz sees it, ‘economic history … is so often environment’s flip side’ (p. 8). It is therefore the global reach, the politico-economic imperatives, and the transformative power of the developmentalist project that seem to cement environmental history’s place in world history, though Pomeranz also judiciously stresses that the ways in which the Chinese – his particular concern – manage their environment and pursue their developmentalist project is not, for cultural, political, and environmental reasons, simply identical to the ways in which Europe and North America do theirs.

It would have made for a more coherent and challenging volume if other contributors had explored Pomeranz’s theoretical model and its historical explication, but, Burke apart, they do not. The consequence is a volume that lacks consistency of focus and theoretical orientation, that shifts between apocalyptical case studies, regional reviews, and laudable attempts to theorize the global. There is, in consequence, a stronger sense of the interconnectedness between past and present within regions than between one region and another. Burke’s assertion that ‘putting the environment into world history is … an urgent intellectual project’ (p. xiii) seems not only to ignore a great deal of intellectualizing around environmental history and its global role in the past (remember the Annales ) but also to state an objective that this volume, for all its important and exemplary essays, fails collectively to attain.