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Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies. Edited by Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. Pp. xi+337. $29.95.
Cultivating the Colonies is a recent addition to the rich body of literature on the interactions of colonial states with the environment. It explores the theoretical as well as the practical aspects of "the relationship between power and nature" and the "nature of power," and it covers various environmental issues through case studies that range in time from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. Instead of providing an "easy" answer on the nature of colonialism, the authors shed light on both the destructive and conservationist aspects of colonial states. Taken together, the chapters cover a vast geographical expanse. From Russian Siberia to German Africa to British India to Louisiana, each case study demonstrates either elements of "continuities" or instances of "departures" that shaped the history of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial attitudes toward nature.
To give coherence to a book with a vast spatial, topical, and temporal scope, it is thematically organized into three parts, starting with how the metropolitan states perceived the environment of the colonies, followed by...