scholarly journals Making the leap: commodity chains and the potential for global environmental histories of capitalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (49) ◽  
pp. 698-715
Author(s):  
Jack Bouchard
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Commodity Chain ◽  
Commodity Chains ◽  
Commodity Flows ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Do So

This article is a brief response to Leonardo Marques’ essay “Commodity Chains and the Global Environmental History of the Colonial Americas.” It focuses on the practical and theoretical limitations of commodity-chain histories as away to address our political and environmental moment. It argues that commodity-chain histories must overcome the complexity of their subjects, and leap the theoretical gap between local and global scales without losing sight of nature. To do so, the article advocates for more work by environmental historians, and a focus on transformation rather than commodity flows.

scholarly journals Brot für die Hauptstadt. Niederösterreich und die Nahrungsversorgung Wiens

2021 ◽  
pp. 451-477
Author(s):  
Jonas Albrecht
Keyword(s):  
Food Supply ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Commodity Chain ◽  
Commodity Chains ◽  
Commodity Flows ◽  
Key Points ◽  
History Of ◽  
Flour Production ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

Bread for the Metropolis. Lower Austria and Vienna’s Food Supply. This chapter analyses the food supply to the city of Vienna during the first half of the 19th century, with a focus on two key points: first, it will be argued that the period before the introduction of industrial means of transportation has been largely neglected by historians when it comes to the history of Vienna’s food supply and the Lower Austrian industries involved. Second, the chapter shows that this story can only be told as a history of growing cross-border interconnections and commodity flows. The study thus analyses the food or commodity chain of grain. It concludes that well before 1850, bread consumption in Vienna and flour production in the city’s southern environs were essentially integrated into international commodity chains, profiting from streams of raw materials from relatively distant regions and ecosystems on the empire’s periphery.

Reflections on the Public Interpretation of Regional Environmental History In Western Pennsylvania

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Chris J. Magoc
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Resource Extraction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Western Pennsylvania

This essay attempts to counter the scarcity of efforts to address issues of natural resource extraction and environmental exploitation in public history forums. Focused on western Pennsylvania, it argues that the history of industrial development and its deleterious environmental impacts demands a regional vision that not only frames these stories within the ideological and economic context of the past, but also challenges residents and visitors to consider this history in light of the related environmental concerns of our own time. The essay explores some of the difficult issues faced by public historians and practitioners as they seek to produce public environmental histories that do not elude opportunities to link past and present in meaningful ways.

scholarly journals Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950–2000

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iva Peša
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Aspects ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Central African Copperbelt ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Forestry Policies

Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s, particularly regarding notions of ‘waste’, this article problematises the silencing of the environmental impacts of mining. To make the environmental history of the Copperbelt visible, this article examines forestry policies, medical services and environmental protests. Moreover, by historically tracing the emergence of environmental consciousness, it contextualises the sudden ‘discovery’ of pollution in the 1990s as a local and (inter)national phenomenon. Drawing on rare archival and oral history sources, it provides one of the first cross-border environmental histories of the Central African Copperbelt.

The World the Bedouin Lived in: Climate, Migration and Politics in the Early Modern Arab East

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Astrid Meier ◽  
Tariq Tell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Societal Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Marginal Zones

Environmental history provides a perspective from which we can deepen our understanding of the past because it examines the relationships of people with their material surroundings and the effects of those relationships on the individual as well as the societal level. It is a perspective that holds particular promise for the social and political history of arid and marginal zones, as it contributes to our understanding of the reason some groups are more successful than others in coping with the same environmental stresses. Historians working on the early modern Arab East have only recently engaged with the lively field of global environmental history. After presenting a brief overview of some strands of this research, this article illustrates the potential of this approach by looking closely at a series of conflicts involving Bedouin and other power groups in the southern parts of Bilād al-Shām around the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Harper
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Variability ◽  
Ice Cores ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
History Of ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
Climate Proxies

Global environmental history is currently being enriched by troves of new data, and new models of environmental variability and human impact. Earth scientists are rapidly expanding historians’ knowledge of the paleoclimate through the recovery and analysis of climate proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, stalagmites, and marine and lake sediments. Further, archaeologists and anthropologists are using novel techniques and methods to study the history of health and disease, as revealed through examination of bones and paleomolecular evidence. These possibilities open the way for historians to participate in a conversation about the long history of environmental change and human response. This essay considers how one of the most classic of all historical questions–the fall of the Roman Empire–can receive an answer enriched by new knowledge about the role of environmental change.

Braided Waters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wade Graham ◽  
Donald Worster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Environmental Variation ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Variable Environment ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this book shows how the control of resources—especially water—in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. The book examines the ways in which environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras—a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL TURN IN MIDDLE EAST HISTORY

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Trumbull
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Productive Time

If historians of the Middle East have turned their attention to the environment rather later than those in other subfields, a recent crop of books indicates that a new generation of scholars has spent much productive time considering environmental histories of other geographies. The books reviewed in this essay stand out for their insistence on examining Middle Eastern environments as both ecological facts and representational spaces. Taken in concert, they indicate the vibrancy of environmental history in the field. Moreover, their careful attention to methodology and creative use of sources opens up spaces for new investigations of politics, culture, and religion as mediated through environmental management and representation. Following on the recent work of Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke III, and others, these historians have marshaled environmental, climatological, epidemiological, biological, and geological data for historical argument. Thus, the resulting works situate themselves deeply within their respective historiographic narratives, yet also interrupt, redelineate, and unsettle those narrative assumptions. At its best, the so-called “environmental turn” in the history of the Middle East represents not an intellectual fashion, but rather a major methodological shift that involves a reframing of our understanding of the formation of the field.

Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1990. By James C. McCann. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1999. Pp. iii, 224. $24.95.

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1127-1128
Author(s):  
Shane Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Agricultural History ◽  
African Region ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Green Land ◽  
Black Land

James McCann is the author of one of the most important agricultural and environmental histories of an African region (People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). As such he is well placed to attempt a modern environmental history of the African continent. Overall, he has been successful. Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land is an extremely useful survey of recent trends in research into the causes and consequences of environmental change in Africa. As an introduction to the subject, McCann's book is probably unrivaled.

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