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Landscapes and the Law is situated at the crossroads of environmental, colonial, and legal history. It examines the role of law in consolidating early colonial rule from the perspective of people's access to nature in forests and hill tracts. The book is focused equally on the multitude of colliding claims for access to land and resources, and the complex ways in which customary rights are redefined and codified for the purpose of securing and legitimizing colonial sovereign rule.
List of contents
- Illustrations and Maps
- Glossary
- Preface to Second Edition
- Preface to First Edition
- 1 Histories of Rights in Nature: An Introduction
- 2 A Narrative on the Toda and Its Problems
- 3 Negotiating Law
- 4 Perceptions of Land and People
- 5 Local Politics and Regional Confrontations
- 6 Towards an Environmental History of Law
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
About the author
Gunnel Cederlöf is Professor of History at the Linnaeus University, Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Sweden. Her research spans modern Indian and British imperial history, and environmental and legal history. She was Professor of History at Uppsala University and has taught at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Among her publications are Founding an Empire on India's North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790-1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity (2014), Bonds lost : Subordination, Conflict and Mobilisation in Rural South India c. 1900-1970 (1997), At Nature's Edge: The Global Present and Long-Term History (2018 with M. Rangarajan), Subjects, Citizens and Law: Colonial and independent India (2017 with S. Das Gupta), and Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (2006, 2012 with K. Sivaramakrishnan).
Summary
Landscapes and the Law is situated at the crossroads of environmental, colonial, and legal history. It examines the role of law in consolidating early colonial rule from the perspective of people's access to nature in forests and hill tracts. This major interdisciplinary study is thus concerned with the social history of legal processes and the making of law, being as relevant today as it was when first published a decade ago.The book is focused equally on the multitude of colliding claims for access to land and resources, and the complex ways in which customary rights are redefined and codified for the purpose of securing and legitimizing colonial sovereign rule.
Basing her archival and field work on the Nilgiri Hills in South India, Gunnel Cederlöf explores conflicting perceptions of nature and political visions that are projected onto landscapes and people. She traces debates on property and land rights, and how the empirical sciences merge with the legal claims justifying land acquisition. Popular resistance strategies to such exploitation are analysed, and a cross-cultural comparison made between early legal processes and social history in India, New Zealand, and North America.
Additional text
'Cederlöf allows us a long overdue introduction to work we need to explore further if we are to develop stronger analyses of our own local and regional environmental histories.'
- HEATHER GOODALL, Emeritus Professor, University of Technology Sydney
