Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire ─ New Views on Environmental History

19th-century British imperial expansion dramatically shaped today's globalised world. Imperialism encouraged mass migrations of people, shifting flora, fauna and commodities around the world and led to a series of radical environmental changes never before experienced in history. Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire explores how these networks shaped ecosystems, cultures and societies throughout the British Empire and how they were themselves transformed by local and regional conditions.

This multi-authored volume begins with a rigorous theoretical analysis of the categories of 'empire' and 'imperialism'. Its chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, draw methodologically from recent studies in environmental history, post-colonial theory and the history of science. Together, these perspectives provide a comprehensive historical understanding of how the British Empire reshaped the globe during the 19th and 20th centuries. This book will be an important addition to the literature on British imperialism and global ecological change.

James Beattie is Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He is the author of Empire and Environmental Anxiety (2011) and a founding co-editor of the journal International Review of Environmental History.

Edward Melillo is Assistant Professor at Amherst College, USA. He teaches courses on global environmental history and is the author of Strangers on Familiar Soil.

Emily O'Gorman is an environmental and cultural historian in the Department of Environment and Geography at Macquarie University, Australia. She has published in a range of journals and is the author of Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (2012). She is an Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities.