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Richard Grove: Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History 1400-1940. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1997.
The contents of this book hardly live up to the ambitious title but that should not prompt much disappointment. There is much to learn from Grove's discussion of the narrow theme that he concentrates upon: European environmental knowledge derived from tropical colonies. Since Grove has been one of the few writers to center his research around this theme, he has an abundance of novel material to present. The six separate essays constituting this book appear as if they are the overflow of his earlier book Green Imperialism (1995). Grove's concern with the colonial context for the historical development of conservationist ideas among Europeans places his work in between the two poles of most environmental history writing. He follows neither the tendency to write about the intellectual history of Western environmentalism as if it had no connection to empire nor the tendency to describe the ecological destruction wreaked by Europe in the colonies. His perspective is summed...