Comments on: Help! Know any planetary history?

By: open source

open source — Sun, 06 May 2012 08:58:35 +0000

open source…

[...]Help! Know any planetary history? « Pue's Occurrences[...]…

By: Brian J Goggin

Brian J Goggin — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:01:39 +0000

Stop me if you’ve already thought of this, but it strikes me that you might find a lot of material in economic history. Sara’s comment reminded me of James Belich [b]Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World 1783-1939[/b], OUP 2009. I haven’t started it yet, and I got only a little way in to Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke (of TCD) [b]Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium[/b], Princeton UP 2007.

I got distracted by a reference to the work of Brinley Thomas and have now added to the unread pile his [b]The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy: selected essays[/b], Routledge 1993, [b]Migration and Urban Development: A Reappraisal of British and American Long Cycles[/b], Methuen 1972, and his essay “Escaping from Constraints: The Industrial Revolution in a Malthusian Context”, originally in [b]The Journal of Interdisciplinary History[/b], which I can’t get at, but also in Robert I Rotberg & Theodore K Rabb [b]Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World[/b], Cambridge UP 1986.

The link to environmental matters is in resources: for instance, the Thomas essay in Rotberg & Rabb begins: “The industrial revolution was Britain’s response to an energy shortage which afflicted its economy in the second half of the eighteenth century. A population explosion intensified the need to change its energy base from wood fuel to fossilized fuel.”

Apologies if you already know about all this stuff.

bjg

By: Sara

Sara — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 14:26:17 +0000

The two environmental historians that I’m aware of in the American context are William Cronon at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (http://www.williamcronon.net/ – there are pdfs of a few articles you can download on the website as well as a list of books) and Richard White at Standford, but I’m sure there are many more. In American history, the environmental aspect especially relates to colonialism and western expansion.

Sara

By: Brian J Goggin

Brian J Goggin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:12:56 +0000

Another Jared Diamond book that might be of interest is Collapse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

bjg

By: puesoccurrences

puesoccurrences — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:43:47 +0000

Juliana: Yes – have finally made my way around to environmental history! I’ve no idea why I never did before. Thanks for the tips. I’ve read David Dickson’s *Arctic Ireland* – an excellent book – but there’s loads here to follow-up on. Will have a joyous time working my way through them.

Thanks too to Caroline Pennock for her recommendations via Twitter (via @carolinepennock). For the record, she recommended the Environmental History Resources (http://bit.ly/ewjBfc) and IHR’s overview of environmental history from its Making History Project (http://bit.ly/ma0ej). Plenty of fascinating looking writing there too.

Plenty to get me started, but I’d be happy to add more to my list if anyone else has any further reccomendations.

Kevin

By: Juliana

Juliana — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:58:40 +0000

Ah Kevin, you’ve discovered environmental history. It’s good stuff. I would think that it has great relevance as well to African history and to how European nations view Africa. In particular there is interesting literature on the lasting association (particularly in the ideas of Europeans) between tropical climates and disease.

Here are some fun ones to get you started:
A. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe
W. McNeill, Plagues and peoples
Or for a less biological (microbial) and more environmental view of a huge range of time see
J. Diamond, Guns, germs and steel

Diamond is more of a synthesizer, and he is far too deterministic, but he comes up with some interesting ideas and is easy to read.

I haven’t read as much specifically about Africa, but W. Beinart and L. Hughes, Environment and Empire has a pretty comprehensive bibliography that could be mined.

As for Ireland, there’s David Dickson’s Arctic Ireland

An environmental history of the Viking Age sounds like a fantastic idea, I’ll ask Poul Holm if he knows of any.

Juliana