Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 318

The close relation between colonial empires and (so-called) natural resources has been a well-known subject of historical study. Often, these resources appear in the story once they would have been available – the cotton picked, the trees felled, the oil pumped from the earth – with the environment that offers the resources out of focus. The attention for the environmental side of colonial resource extraction policies – either with or without taking into account how the colonized were using these resources and were affected – is more recent. Two books of this more recent type feature in this review. Corey Ross’s Ecology and power in the age of empire was first published in 2017, with the paperback edition following in 2019. Eleven chapters cover over 400 pages, an impressive tour de force of colonial environmental history. But I propose to turn our attention first to the volume of essays edited by Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett Bennett, published in 2020. Their attention within the wider context of colonial environmental history focuses on the movement of plant and animal species between different geographical areas. The nine chapters (plus introduction and epilogue) are presented by a team that is well balanced in terms of focus areas, gender (as far as I can tell), and regional coverage. Together, the team brings specific species like tobacco and oysters, and arrangements like zoological and botanical exchange networks, to our attention. The overarching concept the book seeks to discuss is the question of non-human agency, with a connected question about how historians can mobilize insights from non-historical disciplines to capture that agency – two issues very close to my own interest!

There is enough to enjoy in the book; each chapter convincingly presents the social construction of ecological sciences and the associated movement of species. As with many edited volumes, the promised discussion of the main themes is not equally visible in all chapters. We do indeed find recognition of the non-humans that co-shape the story throughout the volume, but a few chapters do not move very far beyond the descriptive aspect. In the introduction and most chapters, the concept of networks is prominent. It is a logical choice, as exchanges between territories lend themselves well to being described as movements between nodes. So far so good. I would object, however, to the way networks as a concept are made equal to the concept of networks in actor-network theory (ANT) approaches. The word may be the same, but behind words appear different worlds. In network analysis, the network is fixed and the actors move between nodes. In ANT, it is the network that is continuously redrafted by the movements themselves. One is never certain the network will be there. I realize that writing about something that is continuously ambivalent is terribly difficult, but my criticism of the network concept in the book reaches further than some semantic debate. In a network approach, it is easy to connect the ‘local’ to the ‘global’, as the book indeed aims to do, with species moving over the globe (indeed, the global) from locales (indeed, the local) – leaving aside that the term ‘global’ is disturbingly often associated with ‘Western’, and non-western places are the ‘local’ ones. In ANT, the distinction between local and global does not make sense, as every connection needs to be (re)constructed locally. The global is as local as the local. I would have liked to read more about how the networks of exchange had to be continuously performed and created, but I like the way the chapters manage to present their colonial sub-projects in terms of the ecologies they tried to understand and did create – often without actually desiring specific creations!

The epilogue stands somehow apart from the approach in introduction and chapters. It aims to bring together the different chapters, and to make overarching sense of the processes of species movement discussed in the book. This feature is not what strikes me most in terms of the epilogue being different, however. I am simply fascinated that in a book aiming to use concepts like agency, networks, and what we could label as the social construction of (scientific and colonial) practices, the chapter that brings everything together mobilizes a narrative of ‘underlying geographic and evolutionary factors shaping invasion that are then influenced by historical contingency’ (p. 235) – accompanied by a rather traditional idea of science as a practice. Apparently, we can employ agency as much as we want, but we are only playing in the space that has already been shaped by external factors. I would like to know where these factors come from themselves – and see no other explanation than that these factors are the results of the agencies that shaped them, a route that the epilogue clearly does not pursue. Interestingly, one reason why the epilogue does fit with the other parts of the edited volume rather well, is the way networks are conceptualized as existing features, within which actors move – as I already suggested above. As soon as we use actor-network theory as a theory of actors-in-a-network, the network becomes a fixed pattern – and we have returned to concepts like agent and structure that ANT wanted to challenge in the first place.

I may not prefer the way it is done, but the question taken up in the epilogue of Environments and empire of how to bring the diverse experiences of different colonial regions together is worthwhile. Perhaps the monograph Ecology and power in the age of empire by Ross could offer much more in terms of relating different locales over time, with its single author discussing an impressive set of case studies on different ecologies and colonies. The ingredients are certainly there: we read about cotton, cocoa, rubber, tin, copper, oil, nature conservation and forests, and irrigation, and we move from continent to continent in a really impressive book on how ecological resources were claimed, used and spoiled by colonial agents, from individuals to states. The chapters cover a lot of ground but maintain a comprehensive narrative of improvised planning – if I may borrow one of my own concepts. In some of the topics I think I know something about (like Geertz’s agricultural involution concept), I found some of the references not up-to-date with recent scholarship. However, it is much to ask from an author who writes about so many aspects in admirable detail to have everything at the same level of scholarly debate. Overall, the book convincingly illustrates its three main propositions. It may not be the first imperial movement that changed environments rather drastically (the Assyrian empire comes to mind), but modern imperialism did mark a seminal period for the ecosystems of the colonial world. This thorough transformation of the colonial era indeed built on longer histories, and resulted in considerable harm to these diverse environments. After reading the book, one wonders how there is a single landscape left in the tropics, so much has been developed, moved, spoiled, turned into capital, etc.

What I miss in the richness of the book, is a closer connection between the case studies. There were opportunities to make links between regions, commodities and periods. To take another example that I can easily recognize, the large-scale irrigation systems in colonial India (that Ross mentions on pp. 316–18) are more or less directly related to the current pumping of groundwater in the Punjab referred to on p. 387 – if only because the British systems would have brought the groundwater that is now pumped out. I would also think that the forestry themes and chapters could have been connected more clearly. Obviously, Ross has made efforts to bring his themes, times, and ecologies together. In the introduction, he presents the three propositions I already mentioned, which serve as a guide for the chapters. In the final chapter, he brings his narratives together through programs like the Green Revolution and the Environmental Conservation policies of the decolonized world. I agree that such programs must be connected to the ecological actions and programs of the colonial world, but I do not think these connections help us to understand how the different extraction and development agendas of colonial powers in different regions and over time were (not) connected in colonial times. Colonial powers, commercial companies and colonized groups were engaged with all kinds of ecological activities simultaneously – forest exploitation was done next to mining or farming. I know that reviewers need to stay away from criticizing authors for not having written the book the reviewer wanted to read, but I hope that Ross manages to use his vast and impressive overview of ecological interventions in the colonial world to bring out these continuously created connections between resource policies and actions of different kinds in different colonial localities over time in his forthcoming work. Indeed, I would think that an actor-network inspired approach would help do exactly that!