Empire, Global Concerns and Environmentalism: ‘Nature without Borders’

The book under review presents a crucial framework to understand environmental issues at a comprehensive and global level. It underlines that it is imperative to reconsider the centrality of the nation-state as the basic unit of studying environmental changes, and it is necessary to move beyond that as the unit of analysis. In other words, the book represents the idea of writing environmental histories as a ‘nature without borders’. The present volume focuses on some of the crucial aspects of the environmental histories of the different constituent parts of the British Empire—Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and New Zealand. The papers included in this volume are updated versions of papers earlier presented in conferences organized in Sussex (2003) and New Delhi (2002 and 2006). Richard Grove and Vinita Damodaran played a crucial role in organizing these conferences to consider many complex issues related to the natural world and the imperial frontiers of science, transatlantic environmental history, forest history of Nigeria, problems of South Asian environmental history, and so on.