The Global Reach and Regional Variations of Environmental History

Despite its critiques, environmental history has attracted thousands of scholars worldwide since the 1970s. Its penetration into mainstream professional history, however, varies dramatically by region and era. Chronologically, interest generally diminishes the further one moves from the present, with notable exceptions: the ancient Mediterranean, where abundant sources attract historians and classicists, and the 1960s-70s, where the surge of popular environmentalism captivated historical imagination.

Regionally, development is highly uneven. In Australia and New Zealand, environmental history has been embraced with enthusiasm since the 1990s. A dominant theme is the ecological transformation wrought by settler colonialism, particularly species extinction and the introduction of exotics. The rapid pace of change makes this focus compelling, though scholars also examine the ecological impact of Aboriginal and Māori societies and the rise of modern environmentalism.

In Southeast Asia, the field is less established in local languages, though scholars like Greg Bankoff and Peter Boomgaard pioneered internationally accessible work on colonial environmental change in the Philippines and Dutch East Indies. East Asia presents a contrast: as of 2000, historians in China, Japan, and Korea showed limited interest, while foreign scholars working on China produced significant environmentally-inflected economic history focusing on agriculture, irrigation, and state management. After 2000, scholars like Bao Maohong began cultivating the field within China. Other parts of Asia, including Southwest and Central Asia, remain largely unexplored by environmental historians, despite excellent work by historical geographers.

In Europe, the field has flourished since 1990. Foundational works like The Silent Countdown (1990) demonstrated how to leverage deep documentary traditions. Early leadership came from historians of Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland, and the Netherlands, focusing on forests and water, while Southern European agrarian traditions enriched rural environmental history. Eastern Europe started later, hindered by pre-1989 political constraints, but communities in Hungary and Czechia are now active. Europeanists excel in climate history and maritime studies, though some lament a lack of mainstream engagement compared to their U.S. counterparts.

Africanists were early adopters, inevitably attentive to challenging environments marked by aridity and disease. Colonial environmental alteration is a predominant theme, but scholars have innovatively used oral history to recover African environmental thought and practice, balancing the better-documented actions of colonial states and settlers. Recently, scholarship on South Africa has outpaced that on the rest of the continent. The field’s influence is underscored by its centrality in major syntheses like John Iliffe’s Africans: The History of a Continent (1995).

Before examining South Asia and Latin America in detail, the trend toward global-scale environmental history warrants mention. This approach is intellectually justified by the global nature of ecological processes and environmental culture, but pragmatically daunting due to the scale of information. Early global syntheses came from geographers, sociologists, and even a former diplomat. Professional historians later contributed focused global studies, such as Stephen Pyne’s work on fire history or Ramachandra Guha’s on environmentalism. Joachim Radkau’s Natur und Macht (2000) was a pioneering general history, followed by a wave of world environmental histories. While inherently challenging, the field is arguably more amenable to global analysis than labor, women’s, or intellectual history.