Environmental History Book List
Featured Title(s)
Resurrecting the Granary of Rome
Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa
Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today.…
All Titles
Cultivating Success in Uganda
Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies
Kigezi, a district in southwestern Uganda, is exceptional in many ways. In contrast to many other parts of the colonial world, this district did not adopt cash crops. Soil conservation practices were successfully adopted, and the region maintained a remarkably developed and individualized land market from the early colonial period.…
Encountering the Past in Nature
Essays in Environmental History
Edited by Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku
A deeper understanding of contemporary environmental problems requires us to know where we come from, and the study of environmental history will help us in that quest. Environmental history, in short, may be described as an attempt to study the interaction between humans and nature in the past.…
The Green Archipelago
Forestry in Preindustrial Japan
This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman’s widely acclaimed study of Japan’s environmental policies over the centuries.…
Highland Sanctuary
Environmental History in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains
For more than a century, the world has recognized the extraordinary biological diversity of the forests of Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains. As international attention has focused on forest conservation, farmers, foresters, biologists, and the Tanzanian state have realized that only complex negotiations will save these treasured, but rapidly disappearing, landscapes.…
How Green Were the Nazis?
Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich
Edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller
The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature. How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.…
Imagining Serengeti
A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present
Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists.…
Imperial Gullies – On Sale
Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho
Once the grain basket for South Africa, much of Lesotho has become a scarred and degraded landscape. The nation’s spectacular erosion and gullying have concerned environmentalists and conservationists for more than half a century.…
Inventing Global Ecology – On Sale
Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947–1997
Blue jeans, MTV, Coca-Cola, and… ecology? We don't often think of conservation sciences as a U.S. export, but in the second half of the twentieth century an astounding array of scientists and ideas flowed out from the United States into the world, preaching the gospel of conservation-oriented ecology.…
Inventing Pollution
Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800
Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food.…
Resurrecting the Granary of Rome
Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa
Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today.…
Social History and African Environments – On Sale
West African Strategies
Edited by William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor
The explosion of interest in African environmental history has stimulated research and writing on a wide range of issues facing many African nations. This collection represents some of the finest studies to date.…
South Africa’s Environmental History – On Sale
Cases and Comparisons
Edited by Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe and Bill Guest
Environmental history in southern Africa has only recently come into its own as a distinct field of historical inquiry. While natural resources lie at the heart of all environmental history, the field opens the door to a wide range of inquiries, several of which are pioneered in this collection.…
Triumph of the Expert
Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism
The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire.…
Tropical Pioneers
Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800–1900
In 1800, the highlands of Sri Lanka had some of the most biologically diverse primary tropical rainforest ecosystems in the world. By 1900, only a few craggy corners and mountain caps had been spared the fire stick.…
