Modernizing Nature

Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development, 1800-1950

Bibliographic Data

ID9800500
AuthorsZoë Laidlaw (0000-0002-5256-6722, Royal Holloway University of London, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume124
Issue507
Pages473-474
Publication date2009-04-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cep068
OpenAlexW1966450939
LanguageEN
Citations received5

S. Ravi Rajan's book demonstrates that imperial forestry was profoundly shaped by continental European methods and foresters, rather than being ‘merely a product of colonial expediency’. Rajan identifies a series of historiographical gaps, including the neglect of scientific communities, institutions and the discipline of forestry; insufficient consideration of the ‘historical baggage of agendas’ stemming from the science of forestry's European past; and a failure to understand forestry as a ‘pan-colonial phenomenon’. In tracing the trajectories of ideas, personnel and practices relating to forestry from Prussia and France to India, then to other parts of the British Empire, and finally back to the British Isles, Rajan does more than address these gaps: he makes a contribution that goes well beyond the history of imperial forestry to illuminate wider questions of empire. Alongside an account of the emergence of professional forestry and state control of imperial forests, Rajan's work points to the growing influence of scientists and science on imperial policy, the heterogeneity of the colonial state, and the connections between metropolitan and colonial sites. Beginning with a close study of influential eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forestry texts and leading European foresters, Rajan shows how (particularly Prussian) methods for estimating and normalising what were increasingly understood to be ‘forest resources’ were transplanted to India during the nineteenth century. He also demonstrates that it was not only European silviculture that migrated to the subcontinent, but also foresters’ preconceptions about the moral backwardness of peasantries. Britain's imperial foresters saw themselves as ‘economic producers and environmental guardians’, and this leads Rajan to an interesting conclusion: he emphasises that foresters’ attitudes to class were just as important as their understandings of race before the later nineteenth century. Even when foresters’ conviction of their superiority over the inhabitants and traditional users of colonial forests did become more racially based, attitudes remained inflected by class: poor white farmers, for example, also troubled forestry professionals. Thus, Rajan argues, perceived divisions between the ‘modern’ and the ‘pre-modern’ were as significant as distinctions made between Western and non-Western practices

Ancient history · Backwardness · Ceylon · Colonialism · Community forestry · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Empire · Forest management · Geography · Historiography · Imperial unit system · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · Cambodian History and Society · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management · Forestry · History · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

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