The Rise of Environmental History: Key Scholarship in South Asia and Latin America

Since the 1990s, environmental history has flourished as a dynamic academic discipline, with particularly vibrant scholarship emerging from South Asia and Latin America. While other regions like Canada, South Africa, and southern Europe have also been active, these two areas are notably energized by scholars’ deep engagement with contemporary ecological struggles. This focus often imbues their work with a pronounced political and social commitment, a characteristic that has waned somewhat in European and North American environmental historiography since the late twentieth century.

Within South Asia, and indeed all of Asia, the tradition of environmental history-writing is most advanced in India. Scholars in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have produced comparatively less work. This disparity likely stems from the intense involvement of Indian academics in social and environmental movements since 1980. Furthermore, the historical record from the British colonial period, or the Raj, provides a robust foundation for research. Official gazetteers and exhaustive forestry service memoranda have enabled detailed studies on land use and forest management history.

Indian environmental historians, most of whom are based in India, have prioritized several key themes. Early work concentrated on forests and land use, particularly conflicts over access during colonial forest conservation efforts, which pitted the state against peasant communities. A second major theme is water manipulation, including canal construction in the colonial era and dam-building after independence in 1947. A more recent subject is the fate of wildlife, such as tigers and elephants, and their cultural significance. Despite rapid urbanization, Indian cities remain a understudied topic in this field.

A dominant focus of Indian environmental history has been the role of the state, whether the Mughal Empire, the British Raj, or the post-1947 nation-state. There is a three-fold logic to this emphasis. First, for over a century, Indian states have been environmentally activist, seeking to remake nature according to modernist ideals of security and prosperity. Second, the subcontinent's staggering ecological, linguistic, and cultural diversity drives historians to use the state as a simplifying analytical lens. Third, the centrality of colonial rule in Indian historiography naturally extends to environmental studies, examining interventions like railways and large-scale irrigation.

Since pioneering works like Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil's "This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India", the field has grown exponentially. Scholars struggle to keep pace with new publications. This vigorous growth is mirrored in Latin American environmental history. While the region has a rich tradition of historical geography dating to Alexander von Humboldt, modern environmental history began with Alfred Crosby's "The Columbian Exchange" and work in the 1980s by scholars like Luis Vitale and Warren Dean.

The main issues in Latin American environmental history connect to colonial conquest and settlement, differing from South Asia's experience with colonial rule but not large-scale European settlement. Research has expanded to cover plantation economies, deforestation, and the ecological impacts of capitalism. Warren Dean's "With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest" stands as a masterpiece in this tradition. The environmental history of the Caribbean, however, remains underdeveloped.

Recently, Latin Americanists have diversified their research directions. Alongside colonial studies, they now explore environmental thought and science, as seen in the work of José Augusto Pádua and Stuart McCook. Given the region's high urbanization, urban environmental history has also emerged, with studies on Mexico City, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Bogotá. Synthesis has been provided by works like Shawn Miller's "An Environmental History of Latin America".

Future research will need to incorporate new subjects like climate history, including El Niño impacts, and energy history, as hinted at by scholars like Myrna Santiago. The Caribbean, central to plantation slavery studies, still lacks comprehensive environmental histories. As in India, the field's health is tied to ongoing environmental crises, from deforestation to climate change, which continue to fuel scholarly and public interest.

To sustain innovation, the field must pursue greater interdisciplinarity, integrating with archaeology, ecology, and climatology. It also requires more cross-regional imitation; for instance, American urban environmental history methods could be applied to Asian and African cities. This internal and external integration is key to maintaining the intellectual vibrancy of environmental history.

KEY HISTORICAL SOURCES: Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1984).
Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972).
Guha, Ramachandra and Gadgil, Madhav, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Berkeley, 1992).
Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
Vitale, Luis, Hacia una historia del ambiente en América Latina (Caracas, 1983).
Worster, Donald, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1978).