Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire provides the first wide-ranging environmental history of the heyday of European imperialism, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the colonial era. It focuses on the ecological dimensions of the explosive growth of tropical commodity production, global trade, and modern resource management-transformations that still visibly shape our world today-and how they were related to broader social, cultural, and political developments in Eur...

A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of waterIn the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped t...

Few developments in the industrial era have had a greater impact on everyday social life than the explosion of the mass media and commercial entertainments, and none have exerted a more profound influence on the nature of modern politics. Nowhere in Europe were the tensions and controversies surrounding the rise of mass culture more politically charged than in Germany-debates that played fatefully into the hands of the radical right. Corey Ross provides the first general account of the exp...

**“The MOST IMPORTANT BOOK I imagine I'll ever read.”—Mary RoachFROM AN AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE JOURNALIST comes an urgent investigation of environmental migration—the most underreported, seismic consequence of our climate crisis that will force us to change where—and how—we live.“An IMPORTANT and PROVOCATIVE start to a crucial conversation.” —Bill McKibben**“We are facing a species emergency. We can survive, but to do so will require a planned and deliberate migr...

The definitive environmental history of the twentieth-century world, now updated for the twenty-first.Humans have long transformed the planet, scratching its surface for stones and ores, planting and harvesting crops, sparking fires for light and heat. But since the dawn of industrialization and especially since 1950, our impact has accelerated sharply. Economic, technological, and demographic changes have driven rapid and ongoing shifts in patterns of pollution, h...

Examining a series of El Ni�o-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global clima...

Pankaj Sekhsaria is the most consistent chronicler of contemporary issues in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and one of the best known. His writings on the environment, wildlife conservation, development and indigenous communities have provided insights and perspective on the life of the islands for over two decades. Islands in Flux is a compilation of Sekhsaria's writings on key issues in the Islands over this period and provides an important, consolidated account that is releva...

In a perfect storm, the environment, the global economic system and geopolitics are all undergoing rapid, uncontrolled change. In the same way that the climate is in a state of flux, exhibiting erratic behavior before settling into a new norm, in the wake of the global economic crisis, many of the assumptions about the Western economic system have been destroyed, which leads to some troubling questions:How aggressive will water-hungry China become in order to secure a sufficient sup...

This volume examines the economic, political, social and environmental challenges facing rural communities in the Asia-Pacific region, as global issues intersect with local contexts. Such challenges, from climatic change and volcanic eruption to population growth and violent civil unrest, have stimulated local resilience amongst communities and led to evolving regional institutions and environment management practices, changing social relationships and producing new forms of stratification...

An introduction to hazards, human vulnerability and disaster, paying particular attention to the more severe or novel risks and disaster that affect the general public. The book is split into two parts, the first of which gives an overview of the field of risk and disaster in terms of three perspectives: hazards perspective; vulnerability perspective and the active perspective. The second part illustrates and develops these ideas in relation to some of the more severe dangers and disasters...

'Conservation in the 21st century needs to be different and this book is a good indicator of why.'Bulletin of British Ecological SocietyAgainst Extinction tells the history of wildlife conservation from its roots in the 19th century, through the foundation of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire in London in 1903 to the huge and diverse international movement of the present day. It vividly portrays conservation's legacy of big game hunting, the b...

First Published in 2004. Islands are coming under increasing environmental and social pressure, particularly as a result of the impact of tourism. In many ways, the small scale of these islands—almost enclosed systems—provides researchers with ideal cases in which to observe this process and test theory. The Development Process in Small Island States focuses on the political security, tourism, gender issues, ecosystems, landscapes and economies of island communities. It encompasses islands...