The Environment and World History

Since around 1500 C.E., humans have shaped the global environment in ways that were previously unimaginable. Bringing together leading environmental historians and world historians, this book offers an overview of global environmental history throughout this remarkable 500-year period. In eleven essays, the contributors examine the connections between environmental change and other major topics of early modern and modern world history: population growth, commercialization, imperialism, industrialization, the fossil fuel revolution, and more. Rather than attributing environmental change largely to European science, technology, and capitalism, the essays illuminate a series of culturally distinctive, yet often parallel developments arising in many parts of the world, leading to intensified exploitation of land and water. The wide range of regional studies--including some in Russia, China, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Southern Africa, and Western Europe--together with the book's broader thematic essays makesThe Environment and World Historyideal for courses that seek to incorporate the environment and environmental change more fully into a truly integrative understanding of world history.

Edmund Burke III is Professor, Presidential Chair, and Director of the Center for World History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and coeditor, with David N. Yaghoubian, of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (2nd edition, UC Press). Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Great Divergence, among other books.