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"The East India Company and the Natural World is the first work to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The EIC both contributed to and recorded environmental change during the first era of globalization. From the small island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, to peninsula India and outposts in South and Southeast Asia, the Company presence profoundly altered the environment by introducing plants and animals, felling forests, and redirecting rivers. The threats of famine and disease encouraged experiments with agriculture and the recording of the virtues of medicinal plants. The EIC records of the weather, the soils, and the flora provide modern climate scientists with invaluable data. The contributors - drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - use the lens of the Company to illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857. "--
List of contents
Preface; Anna Winterbottom Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean; Alan Lester 1. Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting Plant Colonialism; Deepak Kumar 2. Botanical and Medical Networks of Madras, 1680-1720; Anna Winterbottom 3. Robert Wright and his European Collaborators; Henry Noltie 4. The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth Century Bengal; Vinita Damodaran 5. The Climate of Bombay from 1799-1828 from Four Colonial Weather Diaries; George Adamson 6. Mischievous Rivers and Evil Shoals: The English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime; Rohan D'Souza 7. The Rafflesia in the Natural and Imperial Imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia; Timothy P. Barnard 8. 'A proper set of views': The British East India Company and the Visualization of South-East Asia in the Late Eighteenth Century; Geoff Quilley 9. Malay-Indonesian Materia Medica and Trans-Cultural Encounters; Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells 10. ''Units...of our mighty Indian Empire': New Zealand/Indian Biological and Landscape Exchanges, 1830s-1890s'; James Beattie 11. St Helena as a Microcosm of the East India Company World; Dick Grove Afterword; Vinita Damodaran Select Bibliography
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"These essays present useful, interesting, and informative data gleaned from what is evidently exemplary research. ... As valuable contributions to the continuum of interdisciplinary history, they deserve long-term appreciation." (Arthur Macgregor, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 44 (1), April, 2017)
"These essays are uniformly strong, and this book is a timely and valuable collection. It is one more indication of the multidisciplinary possibilities entailed by environmental history. ... This compendium provides us with a more nuanced view of empire, one that greatly expands our understanding of imperial histories." (Christopher V. Hill, Environmental History, Vol. 21, April, 2016)
"This is a well-rounded and important collection that brings together scholars active in different sub-disciplines. ... The East India Company and the Natural world is an important volume, useful for specialists and for the classroom... ." (Jayeeta Sharma, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 51 (1), January, 2016)
