Archive

How did we turn our plants, animals, worms, seeds, genes and botanical knowledge into a resourceful commodity? With what consequences? This course will explore how the history of imperial expansion shaped our modern environmental crisis as well as our response to it. These lectures will track the expansion of imperial power and the spread of global capitalism understand the ecological, biological and atmospheric scope of the transformation of the modern world.  How can studying plants, seeds, genes, insects and energy regimes allow us to conduct historical research at different scales--local, global and planetary? The topics covered will introduce you to the multiple approaches of doing environmental history by exploring for instance the power of the idea of tropics in understanding colonized landscapes, pathogens and disease; forests in the British empires of the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent as sites of botanical and agronomic experiments; how extraction of resources are deeply tied to the politics of indigeneity in Africa and South Asia; how contemporary geopolitical fights over water allow for racial and caste consolidation in the global South; how biopiracy and prospecting are at the heart of modern medicine; and how the geopolitics of contemporary pollution governance creates new environmental subjects.