Rethinking Environmental History

World-System History and Global Environmental Change

Contributions by Stephen G. Bunker, William H. Fisher, Rafael A. Gassón, Stefan Giljum, N Thomas Håkansson, Josiah Heyman, J Donald Hughes, Andrew K. Jorgenson, Robert B. Marks, Joan Martinez -Alier, Jason W. Moore, Roldan Muradian, Janken Myrdal, James Rice, Joseph A. Tainter, Immanuel Wallerstein, Helga Weisz, Mats Widgren, Richard Wilk, Michael Williams Edited by Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, Joan Martinez-Alier

Publication date:

18 January 2007

Length of book:

420 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759110274

This exciting new reader in environmental history provides a framework for understanding the relations between ecosystems and world-systems over time. Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier have brought together a group of the prominent social scientists, historians, and geographical scientists to provide a historical overview of the ecological dimension of global economic processes. Readers are challenged to integrate studies of the Earth-system with studies of the world-system, and to reconceptualize the relations between human beings and their environment, as well as the challenges of global sustainability.

Introduction: Environmental History as Political Ecology

Part I The Environment in World-System History: Tracing Social Processes in Nature
1. Environmental Impacts of the Roman Economy and Social Structure: Augustus to Diocletian
2. "People Said Extinction Was Not Possible": Two Thousand Years of Environmental Change in South China
3. Precolonial Landesque Capital: A Global Perspective
4. Food, War, and Crisis: The Seventeenth-Century Swedish Empire
5. The Role of Deforestation in Earth and World-System Integration
6. Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640
7. Trade, "Trinkets," and Environmental Change at the Edge of World-Systems: Political Ecology and the East African Ivory Trade
8. Steps to an Environmental History of the Western Llanos of Venezuela: A World-System Perspective
9. The Extractive Economy: An Early Phase of the Globalization of Diet, and Its Environmental Consequences
10.Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1640-1830

Part II Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Unraveling Environmental Injustice in the Modern World
11. Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade
12. Natural Values and the Physical Inevitability of Uneven Development under Capitalism
13. Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement
14. Uneven Ecological Exchange and Consumption-Based Environmental Impacts: A Cross-National Investigation
15. Combining Social Metabolism and Input-Output Analyses to Account for Ecologically Unequal Trade
16. Physical Trade Flows of Pollution-Intensive Products: Historical Trends in Europe and the World
17. Environmental Issues at the U.S.-Mexico Border and the Unequal Territorialization of Value
18. Surrogate Money, Technology, and the Expansion of Savanna Soybeans in Brazil
19. Scale and Dependency in World-Systems: Local Societies in Convergent Evolution
20. The Ecology and the Economy: What is Rational?

The contributors to Rethinking Environmental History argue for a truly global, historical, and transdisciplinary approach to environmental history, even when analyzing the most localized instances of degradation. They show how and why environmental degradations have been uneven throughout history—and in the process employ, critique, and extend world-systems analysis.