Scorched Earth

This book is one of those rare works that truly should transform how historians understand the past, with genuine implications for how they, and everyone else, ought to perceive the present. Kreike argues that the rigid distinction made by environmental historians and other scholars between nature and culture has blinded them to the centrality of “environmental infrastructure” as a “target, objective, and means in war” (400). Owing to that blindness, historians have misjudged the fundamental importance of war in shaping the history of the last five centuries, and failed to discern continuities across time and space in the practice and aims of war. The same blindness afflicts present-day legal frameworks that ignore direct links between environmental and social infrastructure and thus wrongly distinguish between crimes against humanity and crimes against the environment.Kreike defines environmental infrastructure as the “homes and stables, fields, fences, soils, crops and weeds, granaries and food stores, animals, orchards, wells, dams, canals, and sluices” that are shaped equally by human and nonhuman actors and constitute a hybrid space between nature and culture (2). This infrastructure is continually maintained, or “environed,” because it sustains the lives and lifeways of human populations. Kreike reveals that it was an irresistible target in war. Plundering it allowed armies to “live off the land,” or permitted migrants to find refuge and relief. Its gradual destruction could finance wars (or satisfy soldiers’ greed) and break an enemy’s capacity to resist. After its destruction, populations who once depended on it suddenly became vulnerable to famine and epidemic disease—“envirocide,” as Kreike terms it—inevitably culminating in the wholesale destruction of lives and livelihoods.Kreike offers ten case studies in ten chapters that unearth these grim relationships, organizing them chronologically from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The case studies are roughly divided by spatial and to some extent temporal scale. Six provide richly detailed analyses of “lived experience in hamlets and villages,” occasionally by the day, and four consider the plight of millions across continents and decades. The contrast is effective, if eclectic. The micro-analyses favor the Dutch topics and primary sources that Kreike knows exceptionally well, providing intricately detailed causal arguments; the macro studies depend primarily on secondary sources and include (well-founded) speculation. Although Kreike justifies his focus on the Dutch partly by lamenting the relative absence of Dutch archives in English scholarship, key polities and warzones are omitted from what is supposed to be a global history.By focusing on the environmental toll not only of battles or massacres but also the everyday depredations of war, Kreike’s chapters advance a series of startling claims—for example, that the devastation of environmental infrastructure in war rendered populations vulnerable to epidemics and the climatic changes of the Little Ice Age. In his view, climate historians who identify what Parker calls “fatal synergies”—through which climate change led to harvest failures, famines, epidemics, migration, and war—reverse the causality.1 Envirocide allowed climate change to have a destructive impact on populations. Likewise, Crosby’s “portmanteau biota” of imported microbes, pests, plants, and domesticated animals did not accidentally transform the Americas.2 Instead, envirocide rendered Indigenous populations vulnerable to epidemics, allowing new plant and animal species to take root.These insights are not entirely new, but when combined with the concept of environmental infrastructure, they persuasively suggest that war in all of its forms has more historical agency than most historians have accepted. A counter-argument would be that when history is viewed exclusively through the lens of war, war will inevitably appear responsible for nearly everything. Kreike argues, for example, that envirocide primarily accounted for the Dutch Golden Age, but, as he acknowledges, historians such as van Zanden have found that Dutch prosperity had medieval roots.3Kreike’s book is most fascinating, and controversial when its focus on environmental infrastructure questions the rigid boundaries that historical narratives tended to establish between perpetrators and victims, colonizers and the colonized, modern and pre-modern. Envirocide and total war were not unique to Western empires, Kreike argues, nor were they specific to one particularly bloody period in the history of war. Rather, because environmental infrastructure was essential to sustaining life, nearly all armies attempted to destroy or exploit it, no matter the rules that they claimed to follow on paper. Those who had suffered envirocide were no less likely to resort to it themselves, whether they were Dutch refugees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or Ute and Comanche raiders nearly 200 years later.Kreike’s is a challenging and thought-provoking history, leaving no ambiguity in its lessons for the present. The concept of environmental infrastructure, he argues, explains why we often underestimate the challenge of rebuilding after war. Most importantly, it reveals why envirocide should now be legally understood as a crime against both nature and humanity. Many environmental historians study the past partly to understand the present. In this landmark book, Kreike sets the standard for how to do so most effectively

Adversary · Blindness · Criminology · Environmental ethics · Famine · Humanity · Political science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy