Imperial Environments

Our strategy is twofold: first, we have chosen to highlight works of environmental history, recognizing the importance of place and ecology in human experience; second, our emphasis on empires operates as a means through which to acknowledge dynamics of power, capital, and governance that have reshaped social and environmental landscapes the world over. Our deliberate effort to bring into conversation histories drawn from distinct imperial contexts challenges us to sharpen the analytic of empire, clarifying how it applies in each case. For us, collecting this literature is a response to multiple challenges: the contemporary challenge of understanding environmental politics in our present moment and the methodological challenge of scaling between emplaced and global histories.

Debates over the appropriateness of the term “Anthropocene” demonstrate the intellectual challenge posed by narrating power imbalances in global environmental histories. As the “Anthropocene” has gained greater analytical purchase in public discussions of the climate crisis, debates over its utility and usage have only intensified. Many argue that the prefix of “Anthros,” or “human,” perniciously implies that the current ecological crisis was caused by all humans (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). Other terms have been floated, each centering distinct power structures. These frameworks include the “capitalocene” (Moore, 2017), the “plantationocene” (Mitman, 2019), and the “Anglocene” (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016), referring, respectively, to the foundational roles played by capitalism, plantation economies, and British imperialism in ushering in a global fossil economy. At stake in this debate over the proper name to designate our current era of ecological crisis are questions of power and agency.

Our Colloquy aims to draw power to the fore of environmental history through the lens of “Imperial Environments.” While frameworks like the “Anglocene” draw important attention to the central role British imperial expansion played in changing ecological and energy regimes, it is critical to recognize how the fossil economy was not built in a vacuum, but rather through British interactions with other sovereign entities. The nineteenth century was a period of intense imperial expansion and competition on a global scale. The global span of empires in this period precipitated a diffusion of specific legal, scientific, and corporate frameworks throughout the world. Legacies of these processes continue to shape political and economic operations in the present. Technological developments also lent a distinctive character to imperial dynamics in the nineteenth century. The railway and the telegraph famously followed each other across continents, integrating far corners of the earth into a global market. Well-established industrial centers nearer to the imperial metropoles required continual inputs of raw materials drawn from distant colonial outposts.

For the past year, we have explored these concerns through two workshop series: the Eurasian Empires workshop funded through the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Imperial Environments series run through the Stanford Environment and Climate History Workshop and funded by Stanford Global Studies, the Department of History, and the Vice Provost for Graduate Education. Bringing together emerging and established scholars, both at Stanford and beyond, these series have shed light on empires including the British, Mughal, Ottoman, French, American, Spanish, and Russian. Considering such varied contexts, we have asked: How did imperial competition shape different modes of governing human interactions with the non-human and structure environmental degradation? How did imperial power relations reshape ecologies—social and otherwise—over the course of the long nineteenth century? For us, “imperial environments” designates not a singular kind of space or mode of rule, but rather many, varied relationships and experiences. The consistency we observe across these contexts is, simply put, imbalance. Imperial states extract resources, exploit and coerce labor, and construct new flows of profits from periphery to metropole. By drawing together different empires we are able to develop a sense of shared imperial dynamics that developed in the modern period, albeit under distinct governing institutions and regimes.

While drawing these varied experiences together helps identify what is shared, this exercise also helps us acknowledge what is distinct. Legal frameworks, modes of economic governance, religious and spiritual practices, crops and seasonality, are all, in different ways, rooted in place. Drawing from such a variety of scholarship, we are able to see more clearly differences between distinct imperial aims, as well as how imperial forms tried to adapt to different environments, and friction that arose from these processes. We believe that the acute insights gained from deep, specific expertise are sharpened by the contrasts brought out in comparison. The works collected in this Colloquy are not intended to offer general coverage. Instead, we’ve gathered these texts as a set of telling glimpses, each of which, we hope, will improve our vision of the whole. In reading this material, we ask: How do we understand power and place as motive forces in history? How have particular modes of governance shaped people’s relationships to and experiences within given ecologies? How have moments of connection, collaboration, and conflict between distinct imperial regimes shaped local and transregional environments? How can studies of imperial history speak to the contemporary climate crisis and offer a critical rethinking of the Anthropocene? It is with these guiding questions that we hope to engage this work.

Works Cited:

Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. (New York: Verso, 2016).

Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg. “The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1.1 (2014): 62-69.

Gregg Mitman. “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.” Edge Effects. (18 June 2019) Web. https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/

Jason W. Moore. “The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44.3 (2017): 594-630.

Wendy Wolford. “The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111.6 (2021): 1622-1639.