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"Human ecology India History."
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The Bengal Delta : ecology, state and social change, 1840-1943
With a focus on colonial Bengal, this book demonstrates how the dynamics of agrarian prosperity or decline, communal conflicts, poverty and famine can only be properly understood from an ecological perspective as well as discussions of state's coercion and popular resistance, market forces and dependency, or contested cultures and consciousness.
eBook
Dancing with the river : people and life on the Chars of South Asia
An intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of \"hybrid landscapes\" and their inhabitants. With this book, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of \"hybrid environments.\" Focusing on chars -- the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal -- the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a study of human habitation in the nebulous space between land and water, charts a new way of thinking about land, people, and people's ways of life. Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a senior fellow in resource management in the Asia-Pacific Program at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She lives in Canberra. Gopa Samanta is an associate professor in geography at the University of Burdwan. She lives in Golapbag, Burdwan, India.
eBook
An environmental history of India : from earliest times to the twenty-first century
\"The relatively young but rapidly expanding field of formal environmental history informs us ever more about vital patterns of interactions among humans, other living beings, and the material world. Climate change, species extinction, unequally distributed and overstrained essential resources (including clean air, energy, food, land, and water), and other of today's pressing issues can only be understood and mitigated by understanding the many centuries of dynamic changes that caused them. The Indian subcontinent has a distinctively complex environmental history that makes it particularly vulnerable to current environmental stresses\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900
The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human
environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha
argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years
when successive empires struggled to harness lands and peoples to
their agendas across Asia. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia,
1400-1900 compares the practices of the Mughal and British
Empires to demonstrate how their fluctuating capacity for
domination was imbricated in the formation of environmental
knowledge itself.
The establishment of imperial control transforms local knowledge
of the world into the aggregated information that reproduces
centralized power over it. That is the political ecology that
reshapes entire biomes. Animals and plants are translocated; human
communities are displaced or destroyed. Some species proliferate;
others disappear. But these state projects are overlaid upon the
many local and regional geographies made by sacred cosmologies and
local sites, pilgrimage routes and river fords, hot springs and
fluctuating aquifers, hunting ranges and nesting grounds, notable
trees and striking rocks.
Guha uncovers these ecological histories by scrutinizing
little-used archival sources. His historically based political
ecology demonstrates how the biomes of a vast subcontinent were
changed by struggles to make and to resist empire.
eBook
Empire and ecology in the Bengal Delta : the making of Calcutta
\"History of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Early to Mid-Holocene land use transitions in South Asia: A new archaeological synthesis of potential human impacts
While it is clear that current human impact on the earth system is unprecedented in scope and scale, much less is known about the long-term histories of human land use and their effects on vegetation, carbon cycling, and other factors relevant to climate change. Current debates over the possible importance of human activities since the mid second millennium CE cannot be effectively resolved without evidence-based reconstructions of past land use and its consequences. The goal of the PAGES LandCover 6K working group is to reconstruct human land use and land cover over the past 12,000 years. In this paper, we present the first large-scale synthesis of archaeological evidence for human land use in South Asia at 12 and 6kya, a critical period for the transition to agriculture, arguably one of the land use transitions most consequential in terms of human impact on the Earth system. Perhaps the most important narrative we can pick out is that while there are some shifts in land use across these time windows, hunter-gatherer-fisher-foraging remained the dominant land use, and within this there was a mosaic of strategies exploiting diverse and complex landscapes and ecologies. This is not necessarily a new conclusion–it is not new to state that South Asia is comprised of many niches, but demonstrating the deep time history of how people have adapted to these and adapted them is an important step for modelling the impacts of human populations and thinking about their footprints in a longue-durée perspective. Despite the new development of food production between the early and mid-Holocene by overall area foraging life ways continued as the dominant land use practice into the 6kya time window. The development of agriculture and food production was not unimportant–it is the beginning of a land use that eventually comes to dominate the sub-continent, but at 6kya agriculture was restricted to specific contexts. Across 12kya to 6kya and different land uses, the use of mosaic ecologies, diverse strategies and the importance of water as a resource stand out as shared themes.
Journal Article
Nomadic Narratives : A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert
\"Discusses the emergence of socio-historical identities in the Thar Desert with the mobility of its inhabitants\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
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. CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Adas, William Beinart, Edmund Burke III, Mark Cioc, Kenneth Pomeranz, Mahesh Rangarajan, John F. Richards, Lise Sedrez, Douglas R. Weiner
eBook