Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800-1920
James Beattie
In his new book, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800-1920, published by Palgrave Macmillan (2011), Senior Lecturer Dr James Beattie provides a radical and fascinating new analysis of imperialism and environmental change.
Empire and Environmental Anxiety promises to reinterpret histories of the British Empire by unearthing early concerns about human-induced climate change, soil erosion, and a looming timber famine. The book also reveals colonial fears about the power of environments – and environmental change – to affect health.
Empire and Environmental Anxiety further argues that conservation represented a form of imperial control designed to generate revenue and to enable the more efficient exploitation of resources. Environmental anxiety, it demonstrates, tied together parts of South Asia and Australasia through exchanges of policies, people, plants and ideas.
Empire and Environmental Anxiety will be launched at the November conference of the New Zealand Historical Association being held here on the Waikato Campus, 16-18 November 2011.
Palgrave Macmillan (Jun, 2011)
ISBN: 0230553206