This is a book about how horses shaped South African social and environmental history from the seventeenth century to the present. Swart tells an interspecies story - the ‘adventures of a big gentle herbivore and a small, rogue primate’ (p. 10), both of which are invasive species in the landscape of South Africa. As Swart traces the material and political effects of horse introduction in South Africa, she examines the symbolic and cultural dimensions of horse use, while deftly connecting them to material changes in landscapes and horse bodies, and to the emerging structures of social power in South African society. By emphasizing the ‘ecological imperialism’ of horse introduction, she links South African environmental history to the big questions of global environment history. Horses were constitutive of social power, Swart argues, and those power structures had material consequences. Horses mattered. Swart provides a lucid case for why social history and environmental history each provide strong methodological and theoretical approaches for writing animal history.

The book is organised into eight chronologically arranged, thematically connected essays. In, ‘But where’s the bloody horse?’ Swart discusses why and how animals need to be reinserted into human histories. In ‘Reins of power,’ she explains the arrival of horses in the seventeenth century. Horses were a technology of European conquest and settlement of South Africa, providing mobility for military, hunting and transport purposes. Yet southern Africa was an exceptionally difficult environment for horses because of climate, plants, predators, parasites and pathogens. Initially, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) limited horse importation and encouraged domestication of zebras and quaggas. As this failed, more horses were imported and settlers bred a regional type, the ‘Cape horse’. In ‘Blood horses’, Swart discusses nineteenth-century horse breeding as a material means to power, and a symbolic means of performing and reasserting status among settlers of European descent; and in the next chapter, ‘The Empire rides back’, explores the same process among the Basotho people when attempts to keep horses out of indigenous hands failed, along with attempts to restrict horse ownership to the European upper class. For both Europeans and natives, horses were a means of agency, resistance and state building.

The South African (Boer) War of 1899-1902 played a role in altering the South African horse world. ‘The last of the old campaigners’, shows how horses were critical factors in the outcome of the war. The hardy Boer horses distinguished themselves, while the British had to rely on imports not acclimatised to the region. Equine experiences in the war - poor conditions and care, wounds, disease, death - made horses the symbol of war’s sufferings. In the aftermath of war, in rituals similar to those in the American Civil War and the First World War, memorialising dead warhorses was an important part of how South Africans remembered and worked through the war experience. In ‘The Cinderella of the livestock industry’, Swart explores responses to the ruin of the horse industry and the rural economy in the wake of the South African war, followed by four decades in which the horse-human relationship was radically transformed. Appalling horse casualties and importation to meet war demand had diversified the horse population, but both importation and war movement without veterinary precautions resulted in rampant disease. State and cultural politics shaped efforts to revive the horse industry, yet, despite the renown of Boer horses and horsemanship in the war, emphasised importing and breeding English horses, which paralleled the desire to raise ‘a healthy British Race in Africa’ (p. 141). In general, the adoption of motorised transport and machinery undercut practical horse use, with a brief revival when motor supplies and fuel ran low during the Second World War.

By the postwar period there had been a radical transformation in the horse-human relationship. ‘High horses’ describes the re-invention of the horse industry around importing and breeding show horses. Horse breeding reflected two different kinds of Afrikaner identity, both created through consumption and promoting a nostalgic connection to traditional platteland life. Among newly wealthy rural Afrikaners, importation of flashy American Saddlebreds asserted a newly confident, internationalist pro-American identity. Among other groups, the breeding of Boerperds (the traditional horse of the Boers) became a locus of identity politics focused on celebrating Boer heritage, policing ethnic and racial boundaries, and downplaying class differences within the white population. In her concluding chapter, ‘The world the horses made’, Swart considers the problems and promise of writing history that takes animals seriously.

At her best, Swart is a lively and engaging writer. Like many animal historians, she has a propensity for punning in her chapter titles and sub-headings, which underscores the centrality of animals in human experience. Sadly, the writing is uneven, with disappointing lapses into thickets of theoretical jargon. I also wish Swart displayed a more nuanced view of technological change. For example, efforts to reassert the primacy of horse use in the 1930s, which paralleled a similar movement in the United States, was more than just cultural politics of nostalgia - it reflected the instability and uncertainty of rapidly changing technological systems. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the role that the United States played in shaping the South African horse world, and also comparisons with American horse history. For example, both countries have herds of feral horses, yet these horses have different meanings within their respective national cultures. Most interesting are the introductory and concluding chapters, where Swart explores the problems of agency and environmental impact.

This focused critical study provides a superior model of how to write animal history. Riding High is a substantial contribution to our understanding about how and why horses were important in specific places, periods and situations and a reminder that there is no human history separate from animal history.

ANNE N. GREENE
University of Pennsylvania

The ‘Animal’ series of Reaktion publishing house has been quietly pushing forward the cause of animal history since Crow was published in October 2003. In writing the history of the lion, Deirdre Jackson has, in many ways, selected the most difficult assignment to date. The thirty-sixth book in the series, Lion deals with an animal that has so thoroughly fascinated human beings and pervaded human history that any pretence at completeness would prejudice the whole endeavour. Jackson makes no such effort but instead provides a nuanced and thoroughly enjoyable book, which manages to survey an astounding range of source material. Lion is an artfully directed safari through terrains that include archaeological material and the latest scientific research, fictional and artistic accounts – from the memoirs of lion-tamers and lion-hunters to folklore and religious writings. The pages are filled with fascinating stories and incidents that are at times chilling, endearing or trivial but which build a fabulously rich picture of the lion over time.

The first three chapters form a pattern that will be familiar to readers of this series. In Chapter One, Jackson describes the lion from an ecological perspective as a surprisingly gregarious and individualistic beast. In Chapter Two she analyses the ‘captive lion’ largely from the memoirs of lion-tamers and looks at the spectacle that lions have been forced to provide. In Chapter Three, Jackson moves away from the flesh-and-blood lion and tracks the fictional lion through ‘lore and legend’. This might perhaps prove to be of deeper interest to environmental historians; it gives an insight into historical human perceptions of nature. She isolates the numerous stereotypes of lions in literature and notes that the ‘lazy lion’ is the most accurate but that the ‘friendly lion’ is the ‘most pervasive of all’. She ends with a brief look at the radical Enlightenment notion that humanity has no claims of superiority over the lion. This notion was espoused by one of Aesop’s creatures, a talking lion, who upon seeing a monument of a human killing a lion remarked that if ‘lions carved monuments, we would be the winners’.

Animal history remains a marginalised sub-genre of history for numerous reasons and Lion betrays many of these shortcomings. It remains extremely difficult for environmental historians to demonstrate the value of non-human agency to mainstream historical studies, particularly in the face of ‘an immensely powerful alliance of intellectual forces [that] have conspired against the view that animals could truly be agents’.¹ The extent to which the notion of intentionality should fit within the definition of agency – environmental historians must surely argue not at all – continues to frustrate efforts to articulate a coherent view of the importance of animal history. Valuable recent animal studies that have concentrated strictly on the dialogue between animals and humans have managed to harvest significant observations.² It is only in Chapter Four that Jackson focuses on genuine interaction between lions and humans and attempts to answer the question ‘[i]f lions prefer to be left alone and are not considered vital sources of food, medicine or adornment, what prompts people to kill them?’ She charts the history of the lion-hunting Mughal, Egyptian and Assyrian leaders through to the Indian and African colonialists and then begins to make some fascinating answers to the question posed above. Ancient lion-slayers ‘demonstrated their mastery over the world at large, sending a clear message to loyal subjects and dissenters alike ... the hunt served to reflect and legitimize political power’ (p. 156). She portrays in a more forgiving light the ‘African pastoralists living in close proximity to lions [who] have had to hunt them in order to protect their domestic animals’ (p. 163), though she notes that rituals developed and ultimately ‘constructions of masculinity centred on the lion hunt’ (p. 163). For European hunters, the solitary encounter was paramount: ‘[p]hotographs of hunters posing with their trophies perpetuated the myth of the individual single-handedly overcoming the animal’ (p. 166). These are fascinating and valid conclusions although only weakly evidenced in Lion and dangerously monolithic; Europeans hunted in Africa for any number of reasons. Jackson does take an interesting look at the hunting mentality and the worries raised by the prodigious slaughter of, among others, the American playboy millionaire P.J. Rainey and his pack of hunting dogs (allegedly Rainey once killed nine lions in just 35 minutes). Jackson also looks at the ‘hunter’s paradox’, illustrated in fiction by the Ernest Hemingway character who said of her quarry: ‘[h]e’s my lion and I love him and respect and I have to kill him’. In real terms this paradox was taken up by by Theodore Roosevelt, a staunch conservationist who nonetheless spent $75,000 on safari in 1909–10, bagging 17 lions. Jackson also takes a brief look at the social make-up of the safari and its apparent dual character as a thoroughly transcultural creation but one thoroughly permeated with racism.

Little of this is new scholarship and links to existing intellectual theories are not generally developed further. For instance, in her brief look at conservation, Jackson notes that lions were finally afforded decent legislative protection by the mid-1930s but fails to look at the reasons behind this protection: why was an animal that threatened the perceived spread of civilisation into the frontier development to such an extent offered any protection at all? She points to the role of Mahbatkhanji II in protecting the numbers of Indian lions, but fails to note the similar roles of Lord Cranworth in East Africa and James Stevenson-Hamilton in South Africa. Stevenson-Hamilton, the father of the Kruger National Park, noticed that the presence of predators is ecologically beneficial to other animals;³ this realisation is usually assumed first to surface in Aldo Leopold’s essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, the publication of which was actually preceded by Stevenson-Hamilton by 32 years.

In her final chapter, she discusses the future of the remaining lions, fabulously named the ‘golden remnant’. She focuses on ecological threats to lions such as the genetic uniformity and vulnerability of the 300 Gir Forest lions in India and the risk of disease. Jackson makes the point that humans and nature are often forced to co-exist in uneasy proximity with depredations on both sides; lions are poached and poisoned but the tragic reverse is also true, between January 1990 and September 2004 Tanzanian lions killed 563 people and injured at least 308 more. Regrettably the humans involved in this clash with nature are often the least powerful and little political will exists to enlist the support of local residents in the conservationist movement. Jackson is not a mere prophet of doom in this respect though, she promotes one cause for the protection of lions which is bound to provoke controversy; adopting the views of various experts she articulates the notion that the trophy hunting industry (which generates $201 million annually in sub-Saharan Africa) could provide the money and environmental protection that lions need and turn the animals from a liability to an asset. Beyond the obvious irony she makes several telling points.

Jackson’s achievement here is significant; she has synthesised a potentially unlimited bank of source material into an interesting, well-structured and ultimately fun book. The pages are punctuated by gorgeous graphics (and often witty leonine wordplay) and weave a cultural tapestry detailing the relationship between lion and human. Although the analysis may not always run deep, Jackson’s role as the first real lion historian has laid the foundations for others to build upon and develop a sustained approach to animal history.

1. Helen Steward, ‘Animal Agency’, Inquiry, 52/3 (Jun. 2009): 228.
2. See for instance Jason Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency and Class: Writing the Histories of Animals from Below’, Human Ecology Review, 41/1 (2007); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004).
3. James Stevenson-Hamilton, Animal Life in Africa (London, 1917), vol. I, p. 5.

JACK DILLON
University of Bristol

The objective of Michèle Dagenais, who teaches history at the University of Montreal, was to ‘demonstrate the centrality of water and its accommodations (aménagements) in the production of new urban forms since the beginning of the XIXth century’ (p. 8). Today Greater Montreal consists of 83 islands on five bodies of water and 315 kilometres of waterfront; these figures (provided near the end of the book) validate Dagenais’s objective.

She examines how, from 1810 to 2010, water was both an asset and a liability, a threat and an opportunity, a source of discomfort and pleasure for Montrealers - political leaders, technicians, businessmen and ordinary citizens alike.

Chapter I studies how previous generations of historians and geographers, such as Raoul Blanchard, approached the role of water in the transformation of Montreal. The ensuing narrative is essentially chronological. Chapter II focuses on the first half of the nineteenth century, the demolition of fortifications, the presence of many small rivers within the urban fabric, the use of river banks, the development and improvement of harbour facilities by private entrepreneurs, in sum the emergence of a ‘new vision of the river as an artefact to develop in order to sustain economic growth’ (p. 62). Chapter III primarily studies sanitary measures from the 1840s onwards and the increasing commodification of water. Chapter IV analyses the transformation of the harbour around 1900, rising concerns about epidemics and new sanitation measures spearheaded by civil servants. Chapter V focuses on an overlooked but enlightening case study, the industrialisation of the Rivière des Prairies: on this river bordering the main island to the north, the opening of a hydroelectric dam in 1930 had unexpected consequences, favouring instead of hampering swimming and fishing leisure activities. Chapter VI deals with the creation of the St Lawrence Seaway, the decline of the harbour in the 1960s, the ‘marginalisation’ of water due to the omnipresence of automobiles, the suburbanisation of the Rive Sud, the increasing popularity of water sports, and the first survey of river conditions spearheaded by a consortium of hunting and fishing clubs in the 1950s. Chapter VII explores the ‘novel representation of Montreal as archipelago’ (p. 198) resulting from a new planning framework for the city as well as from the trauma caused by major floods in the 1970s. Commissioned by the provincial government, the Archipel Project of the early 1980s produced 400 reports; it offered an ‘idyllic representation of the relation between residents and waterfronts’, focused on leisure activities and ‘underestimated physical and technical constraints’ (pp. 212-13). Archipel was abandoned with the political turnover of the 1985 elections, to be superseded by a municipal initiative, Réseau Bleu, promoting again the right to water and the reclaiming of banks for recreation. In the conclusion, Dagenais deplores the lack of realism of environmentalists, who do not take into account the realities of the physical milieu and of historical processes of constant transformation which she has uncovered. From her standpoint, history tells us that the relation between Montreal and its rivers have never been symbiotic, that water was rarely used for leisure in the distant past; it is time to debunk this myth which, against the backdrop of de-industrialisation for the river and Canal de Lachine, has been propagated by the media.

Dagenais pinpoints a major issue in environmental history: the conflict between the desire to democratise access to natural resources, in this instance water, and the increasing technical sophistication and expenditure of rehabilitation efforts, handled by experts supported by politicians. Her analysis is well informed, if convoluted at times. Some chapters rely on a large amount or archival and primary research; others rely on recent books by other Montreal scholars. Readers who, like this reviewer, do not have an intimate knowledge of Montreal’s entire metropolitan region, especially the hydrography of the Saint-Lawrence River and its tributaries, may not comprehend all the nuances of Dagenais’s analysis. Comprehensive and legible maps are sorely missed. Overall the illustrations and their captions are lacking in quality and relevance.

There seem to be two other missed opportunities to broaden readership beyond Montrealers, students of Canadian urban history and scholars specialising in water history and water policy. Nowhere in the main text does the author differentiate between what is specific to Montreal in its relation to water and what is applicable to many Western cities of the same size. Comparisons with the physical use and socio-cultural significance of water in other cities are in the endnotes. That is where, for instance, Dagenais sketches a parallel between the recent rehabilitation of the Vieux-Port and similar undertakings in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston; exploring these parallels would have been a worthwhile contribution to environmental scholarship. The generic vs. specific dilemma is an important methodological question for authors working on the environmental history of water. To what extent do phenomena (which Dagenais analyses with diligence and finesse for Montreal) such as the ‘obsessive fear of bad smells from stagnant waters’ (p. 52); the perceived indecency of bathers in the nineteenth century; drainage and sewer construction following urban growth; sanitation philiosophies; flood control techiques; conflicting industrial and recreational developments for waterfront, change from city to city? Which circumstances are proper to Montreal? Its climate, entailing excessive icing, thawing and flooding? The enormous width of the St Lawrence ? The fact that in Canada the management of navigable rivers is handled by Federal authorities and that of ice and water by municipal entities? Montreal’s peculiar ‘sociolinguistic conditions’?

The author’s ambition to combine environmental and urban history seems to have been slightly short-changed, as far the latter discipline is concerned. To measure its impact on the ‘structuring of urban space’ (p. 9), water, of course, had to take centre stage, but locales, people and artefacts we can regard as holding important ‘supporting roles’ could have been better fleshed out: the lower working class districts most affected by flooding; the various protagonists of Dagenais’s story - river barons, reformer, engineers, physicians; bridges, jetties, reservoirs, public baths, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 on the Ile Sainte-Hélène, all Montreal landmarks devised for, and using, water from a practical, visual and symbolic standpoint.

ISABELLE GOURNAY
School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
University of Maryland

At first, this book seemed like a companion to Barber and Harper (2010) which accompanied an exhibition on cartographic history in the British Library. Instead it is an eclectic collection of maps, some of North America, but most of the United States. The emphasis is on recent maps and images. There is some commentary, but it is mainly descriptive. The book itself has six sections. Two are introductions - one by Frank Jacobs, author of Strange Maps: an Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities, and the other by Fritz Kessler, editor of the academic journal Cartographic Perspectives. They are followed by four thematic chapters: ‘Mapping the continent’, ‘Describing the continent’, ‘Navigating the continent’ and ‘Imagining the continent’. At the end is a short list of references.

The early maps show amazing detail. A remarkably accurate map from 1804 shows the outline of the eastern side of North America (pp. 160-1 - a ‘map of post roads situations and connections’). As early as 1804, Great Slave Lake, even today barely accessible by road, regularly appears on maps. However, we are not told how these maps were made, nor where the information came from. There is nothing on the history of exploration or of history of cartography. How did maps evolve? What were they trying to show, and why? How did they show it? How did early explorers like Lewis and Clarke, create maps and add to map-makers’ knowledge? The book lacks notable historic maps, such as those from 1870 Census which first mapped census data. There are maps from the 1890 census, and recent screen shots from a variety of US government sources, including the National Atlas, the United States Geological Survey, and the US Census Bureau. However, there is no discussion of the differences behind these maps, or of their standardisation, including the issue of ‘metadata’.

The book offers fascinating perspectives on how things can be viewed differently. On pp. 174-5 the Interstate system is presented in the form of an underground map, and on pp. 222-3 as a numerical topology - the US is divided into a 100 x 100 grid, reflecting the numbering system of the interstates, from 1 to 99. Neither map reflects geographic ‘reality’, but the underground-interstate map was one of my favourites. I have never seen the system so clearly. As a reader, I had other ‘favourite’ maps. They include an amazing diagram of the United States showing bearings and distances of the main places from Washington, and local times in relation to Washington (pp. 162-3). Places are shown in relation to each other, but the map shows no land features, coasts, or rivers. Another was ‘Keep America healthy’ (pp. 138-9) - not a map but a statement in the shape of the continental US, which strongly resembles the map of interstate freight flows (p. 20) from the US Office of Freight Management. Other highlights include: 1) the Singles Map, showing areas with more single women than single men, and more single men than single women (pp. 128-9) - amazingly, the East Coast, except Florida, has more single women than single men; the west coast and Florida (!) have more single men than single women; 2) maps of crop and livestock density by county (pp. 104-5); 3) a geological map of the entire North American continent (pp. 84-5); 4) an amazingly complicated map showing wildlife, alongside a simple one showing state birds (pp. 98-99).

Other maps, such as ‘The cottage ornament’ appear to have been a combination of world almanac, map and picture book. It contains a map of the US, a world map, illustrations of coins from different countries, pictures of famous people, and a table of clocks showing times around world (pp. 10-11). Similarly, ‘Our country’, from 1859 shows the US and central America, state seals, and different times in relation to New York (pp. 68-69). Sadly, the book has few examples of cartographic ephemera: for example, table mats from motorway restaurants showing maps of states or regions, which were once common in diners. There is an early map of the Rock Island Line, a Greyhound bus map, and a recent Amtrak map, but no railway maps from the 1920s to the 1950s, the high-point of passenger rail. The railways fostered the national parks and a new kind of tourism, promoted through illustrated magazines like National Geographic, which themselves popularised maps. Also missing are board games and travel games.

There are no maps of America’s place in the world - of overseas territories, overseas bases, trade links or wars fought abroad. It is an interesting comment on the editors that the maps they selected generally have a state orientation. Other representations are possible: climate zones, crop regions, livestock zones, wildlife zones, economic regions, metropolitan areas, catchment basins or land management zones. Even the map ‘Lost’, which shows only places with Lost in the name (pp. 194-5), shows state borders. What about maps of barn types across US, or maps showing the distribution of supporters of professional sports teams?

The rationale for the chapters is unclear. There are two maps of tornadoes: in the introduction (p. 27), and in ‘Describing the continent’ (p. 92). Why are they not together? Their styles are different, but there is no discussion of this. Similarly, one can contrast maps of the distribution of religions (p. 71: ‘The Washington Map of the United States’, 1860) and pp. 122-3 (‘Leading church bodies’ and ‘Old Amish’, 2002). These maps are particularly interesting for the different ways they show information. The mid-nineteenth century one suggests that, even then, Americans were fascinated by regional social differences. Equally, one can contrast ‘Proportion of foreign born to the aggregate population’ (1898, pp. 116-17) with pp. 118-21 (Census demographics, 2006-10) and the US Census’ Population Distribution, 2000 (pp. 126-7). Each map ‘reads’ differently. However, the book’s editors call the cartographer of the map of census demographics an ‘artist’ and the map ‘art’ without going into the deeper implications of this. Surely, to some extent, all maps are art.

Accompanying explanations are often simplistic. For example, on p. 100, a commentary on a map of farm sizes argues that high population density in the Eastern US led to smaller farms. Perhaps, but when the map was made, poor transport links meant that land was isolated from markets. Western farms were characterised by ranching rather than intensive agriculture. Thanks to the Homestead Act of 1862, ‘farms’ of 160 acres - one quarter square mile - were given to settlers. Western lands were arid, and in arid areas farms could be larger. The east had been settled longer and land was more costly; once-large farms had been passed down and divided through several generations. Americans have long viewed their country as a work in progress and used maps to depict change: the spread of the frontier, the spread of the railways, and the growth and development of the country. The blurb on the back of the book claims that the book ‘traces the formation of the United States of America - from its origins as a colonial backwater, through periods of ever-changing country and state borders, to the global and cultural superpower it is today - through the medium of cartography’. Not exactly. However, it contains a sample of historic and contemporary maps which describe the United States, sometimes in its broader geographical setting. Perhaps this book is best described as a collection of cartographic curiosities. However, reading this book posed deeper questions. What is a map? Is it a precis of a landscape, a place, or a region? Is it an essay? Is it an art work? Is it a form of shorthand? An illustration? An analytical tool, allowing us to identify places by their differences? Perhaps the authors meant us to think about these questions in reading the book.

ANDREW RYDER
University of Portsmouth

This book is presented in three parts: Tree Symbolism; Trees and Woodland in the Anglo-Saxon Landscape; and Individual Tree Species in Anglo-Saxon England. The first part occupies something over a third of the book, and it should be noted that here Hooke is painting her picture with a very broad brush. This is very much putting the cults and cultures surrounding trees into context and, in terms of both geography and period, extends far beyond Anglo-Saxon England. The first chapter takes us on a journey through Europe and beyond, introducing us to trees in many and varying cultures, often tracing the very earliest origins of some myths.

This broad focus is pulled in a little for the other three chapters in the first section. The opening of the second chapter looks at Christian symbolism and primarily at the conversion period (i.e. the earliest phase) of Anglo-Saxon history, although Hooke’s examples are very widely selected. Much of this chapter, and the next two, involve presenting the theories of those who have investigated Old English texts in the past, and many of her conclusions are reliant upon the work of academics who were literary specialists or historians or folklorists, so that not all of the findings sit comfortably side by side.

Hooke really hits her stride once we move to the second part. She begins by addressing the issue of just how much woodland was left after prehistoric clearances, and how woodland regeneration might have taken place in the post-Roman period. Once we move to woodland terms, the level of Hooke’s expertise is evident in her analysis of such Welsh variations as ced and coid (for Kinver), and of the Latin recording of woods and the different descriptions for woods, small woods and thickets. Where this work goes beyond more general surveys of place-names is in the examination of lesser-known words like grafa (grove), and what this might have meant in real terms.

The sixth chapter contains a good analysis of charters, in particular, for information such as the high value put on trees which provided pasture for pigs. These instances are often well documented, and the evidence is examined in depth for the Kentish Weald. The discussion continues by addressing the question of just how densely forested the regions traditionally regarded as woodland would actually have been, and methods of pollarding and coppicing are discussed and illustrated with plentiful examples. Less obvious uses for woodlands included bee-keeping, and examples presented here reveal the rare glimpses we have of such industries. Also shown is evidence for industries such as charcoal-burning and building timber, specifically exemplified by West Midland charters.

Moving to focus on individual groups of trees, with place-names used as one way of identifying tree species, Hooke qualifies the charter evidence by pointing to the less than complete coverage of the country with surviving charters. Trees often marked the place of hundred meetings - the local government - with hundreds often taking their names from the landmark e.g. Longtree Hundred, Gloucs. However, other examples Hooke brings to our attention reveal a more sinister use, as in gallows trees - the kind of analysis not usually found in such depth and detail in other histories of the countryside. The most plentiful examples she explores, though, are the trees which appear as boundary clauses in charters, demonstrating expertly just how valuable these sources are in revealing the appearance of the early medieval landscape.

The final, third part looks at the difference in distribution of named species, and why some species appear more in the records for certain counties than others, and where the explanation can be attributed to different geology or land-use. Instances of trees being distinguished by appearance are given, as are associations with certain animals, although species such as oak were singled out because they were likely to be visually distinctive. However, despite the ash’s place in Old English poetry for its association with spears - the weapon of most soldiers in Anglo-Saxon times - ash trees do not attract qualifying words in the way oaks do, but crop up in many combinations in place-names. The yew is discussed for its mythical roles, while the holly comes in for consideration for the difficulty of pinning down references given the linguistic closeness of words meaning ‘hollow’, while the final tree looked at is the lime.

The alder is introduced for its practical uses before moving on to written evidence, since truly ancient specimens do not exist, and place-name evidence unsurprisingly shows a coincidence with damp areas of land. With the willow Hooke reveals a greater spread of references, sometimes as sealh (sallow, as in Selborne) and the different variations of welig/wiig (willow/withy as in Wythall). Despite being singled out for its cultural links to witchcraft, Hooke reveals that the elder is the sixth most cited tree in boundary clauses, while her discussion of the thorn shows that despite also being considered unlucky, it nevertheless crops up more often as a marker than might be expected.

The penultimate chapter deals with other varieties which appear in charters and place-names, such as fruit and nut trees, the commonest being the apple - a tree which also appears in other Old English texts for its medicinal uses. Rather more surprising are Hooke’s revelations over the scarcity of references to birches and beeches. Other trees considered to a lesser degree are aspen and the Sorbus species, and some shrubs such as gorse and broom. Pines appear in Old English literature yet are totally missing from charters, as are poplars and hornbeams, while there are trees mentioned which remain unidentified - examples considered include the cwicbeam, and the mysterious elebeam which appears in several charters of southern England.

The purpose of analysing all this data is expertly shown in the way Hooke draws a picture of the Anglo-Saxon countryside, both in its appearance and in the value which was put upon it as a valuable resource. Her ability is strongest when getting to grips with the detailed extraction of meaning from these scattered surviving words. The appeal for historians will no doubt be in the latter two sections of the book, although those without a historical background may enjoy the broad scene setting of the first part.

LINDA HUTTON
Independent Scholar

‘It’s good to see you here. Ellen Semple was one of our greatest.’ Thus Griffith Taylor, President of the Institute of Australian Geographers welcomed me at its 1961 conference. One of about five women present, I was about to leave for graduate study in the United States. It was an unusual moment. Semple’s interpretations of environmental influences on human geography had long been dismissed as irrelevant or just plain wrong. Taylor, however, was ‘quite willing to be classed as one of those geographers who is tarred with the determinist brush ... I have spent a considerable part of my life studying the conditions affecting man in the immense areas of Empty Canada, the Sahara, Empty Australia and Empty Antarctica. No geographer who has this experience could ignore the paramount control exercised by the environment’ (Taylor 1951, pp. 3–4; 13). He contrasted his vision with that of geographers ‘who base their philosophy on conditions...in Western Europe and much of the United States’ (1951, p. 13).

I recount Taylor’s remarks first because they relate to themes in Keighren’s book – the significance of context and of professional connections in shaping the reception of a theory, and second because Keighren reveals that Semple’s connections with women were important at various points in her career. Since I am interested in gender and the social history of geography, I read Keighren’s text partly through a gender and class lens.

Bringing Geography to Book explores the geography of the production, circulation, and changing critical reception of Semple’s monumental Influences of Geographic Environment in which she interpreted ‘anthropogeography’ in relation to geographic location, area and environments such as coastal, riverine and mountain settings. She aimed to bring the perspectives of the nineteenth-century German geographer Friedrich Ratzel to Anglophone audiences, not simply to translate his work but to elaborate on it, by comparing ‘typical peoples of all races and all stages of cultural development, living under similar geographic conditions (Semple 1911, p. vii). Though long labelled a ‘determinist’, in her preface Semple wrote that she ‘shuns the word geographical determinant, and speaks with extreme caution of geographical control’ (Semple 1911, p. vii). Examining the book’s creation and reception, Keighren is especially interested in ‘interpretive communities’ within academia and beyond in the United States and Britain. He asks why Influences conveyed different meanings to different readers and what differences in reception reveal about the circulation, consumption, and development of geographical thinking.

In six chapters Keighren first addresses emerging approaches to studying the reception of books and ends by reflecting on the geography of how and why Semple’s book rose and fell from favour. The intervening chapters offer a biography of the book’s creation, assessment of popular and scholarly reviews, Semple’s post-publication efforts in travel, field study and lecture theatre to verify and disseminate her ideas and the uneven unravelling of acclaim for her ideas. He separately examines American and British contexts considering where support was sustained (e.g. at Clark University and at Oxford), the book’s use as a stimulus for critical thinking at Aberystwyth, and its rejection as new perspectives emerged on human modification of landscapes, especially in the 1920s work of Carl Sauer at Berkeley and in the growing interest at Cambridge in the perspectives of French geographer Febvre.

Keighren reveals the importance of social networks both in the book’s ascendency and in its decline. I see Chapters 2 and 4 on Semple’s development as an author and on her promotion of the book via public lectures as the two strongest. They situate her in the gender and class cultures of her times. Beyond her well-known origins in an affluent family, we see the ways in which women’s institutions contributed to her development. Keighren describes her undergraduate education at Vassar, the private women’s college, though he does not comment on its eliteness compared with more common normal schools widely attended by middle-class women preparing as teachers. Semple’s Vassar friendships later enabled her extensive field travels in Japan. Following graduation she taught Latin, ancient history and physical geography in her sister’s private school, honing her pedagogical skills while fostering her writing style as a member of the Louisville (women’s) Authors’ Club. A social welfare project of the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs led to her later extended field research and acclaimed 1901 article on the Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains in The Geographical Journal. Her critical contact with Ratzel and subsequent study at Leipzig followed connections made during a tour of Europe with her mother. While the Leipzig study is well reported in the geographic literature, less well known (or mentioned by Keighren) is that it was not unique for North American women of her era to undertake graduate study in German-speaking universities at a time when they could not gain access to American universities (Singer, 2003).

The significance of Semple’s trajectory is most evident in Keighren‘s new material on her use of networks and public lectures to advance her book in Britain. Connecting with influential men such as Keltie, Herbertson and Chisholm, she built her reputation and that of Influences in her lectures at the Royal Geographical and Royal Scottish Geographical Societies, illustrated with lantern slides from her field travels and at the Oxford biennial summer schools. She furthered her library research and writing while staying at the Lyceum Club, the first women’s club in central London for those engaged in literary, artistic, and scientific pursuits.

Chapters 3 and 5 are devoted to popular and scholarly reviews and to the reception of Influences as a text-book. I found them less satisfying than the other chapters, particularly because of methodological challenges. The authorship and audiences of popular reviews could often not be readily identified, so that Keighren found it difficult to discern how place might be reflected in reception. The academic reviews include some within and others beyond geography and indicate how disciplinary affiliation is reflected in reception. In studying textbook use, he identified networks that affected placement of the book on syllabi but this analysis does not reveal how the book was actually used or received by readers. He identified a few marginal notes on copies of the book in American and British libraries, but it is not possible to ascertain when the notations were made nor or contextualise their meaning to the writers. He does not address the challenges of getting a substantial representation of institutions where the book might have been used. Views of some well-known geographers are discussed in the American context, yet it is important to recall that even in early 1920s most universities still did not offer geography courses, and these were often in physiography (Dryer 1924). In contrast, the normal schools commonly included a range of geography courses. What perspectives did they offer? Examination of articles in the Journal of Geography might have confirmed or altered Keighren’s intepretations. As Dryer (1924) commented the Journal ‘offered not only a teacher’s guide but a record of the development of geographic thought in America’ (p. 149).

I commend Keighren for his substantial and innovative study of how the book was received in the U.S. and Britain, but note that future research might consider its history in other contexts.¹ I would also have liked to see the book more fully and explicitly situated within the wider social and intellectual milieu of the period. My qualifications, however, are not meant to detract from the value of Keighren’s study, which is an innovative approach to assessing a work still recognised, if denigrated, as a landmark in the history of geography and environmental thought.

References Cited
Chen, Zhihong. 2011, in press. ‘Climate’s moral economy. Geography, race, and the Han in early Republican China’. In Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold and Stéphane Gros (eds.), Critical Han Studies: Understanding the Largest Ethnic Group on Earth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dryer, Charles Redway. 1924. ‘A century of geography in the United States’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 14(3): 117–149.
Semple, Ellen Churchill. 1911. Influences of Geographic Environment: On the basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropogeography. New York: Henry Holt and Company; London: Constable and Company.
Singer, Sandra L. 2003. Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-Speaking Universities, 1868–1915. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Taylor, Griffith. 1951. ‘Introduction: The scope of the volume’. In Griffith Taylor (ed.), Geography in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Growth, Fields, Techniques, Aims, and Trends, pp 3–27. New York: New York Philosophical Library/London: Methuen.

1. My opening comment on Taylor hints at this possibility. Recent research by Zhihong Chen (in press) takes up the significance of environmental determinist perspectives by early twentieth century Chinese geographers, though she notes the significance for them of Ellsworth Huntington’s writing over that of the original Ratzel or Semple works.

JANICE MONK
University of Arizona

The Seine is the defining geographical feature of central Paris, a gracefully curved line of beauty that divides left bank from right and gives unity and balance to one of the world’s most recognisable urban landscapes. But as Jeffrey Jackson shows in this excellent book about the ‘great flood’ of 1910, the harmonious relationship between river and city occasionally breaks down. For the first three weeks of 1910, Parisians watched with growing concern as the gentle Seine was transformed into a raging torrent, its waters rising to ever more dangerous levels following months of wet weather and an unusually mild Christmas and New Year during which the Massif Central’s winter stores of snow and ice gradually melted. The crisis moment on the evening of 21st January was marked with curious precision when flood waters percolated into the system of compressed air that regulated the ornate clocks in the city’s railway stations and public buildings, most of which stopped at exactly 10.53 pm. The waters rose continuously over the following days, seeping upwards into cellars and ground floors and eventually spilling onto the city’s elegant boulevards and avenues across an expanding area of the central district and the eastern and western suburbs adjacent to the river. Electricity supplies faltered and then collapsed, bringing the Métro to a halt and plunging the night-time city into darkness. Hundreds fled their homes as police, firemen and soldiers, many brought into the city from the provinces, struggled to maintain public order. Precarious wooden walkways were hastily constructed above the swirling, stinking waters to allow at least some movement of people, food and rescue equipment. In a surreal moment, a vinegar factory in the south-eastern suburb of Ivry exploded when water mingled with its volatile chemicals. The flood finally peaked, 25 feet above normal mid-winter levels, on 28th January and then slowly fell back, leaving mud, filth and destruction in its wake.

Jackson creates a compelling day-to-day narrative of the flood and the subsequent clean-up using an impressive range of documents gleaned from Parisian archives, newspapers and magazines, including postcards bearing photographs of water-logged scenes that began to circulate as mementos of the crisis shortly after the flood waters subsided. His account highlights several important lessons that have enduring significance today about the resilience of modern urban infrastructures in the face of extreme environmental challenges, and about the difficult political calculations that determine official responses. In early twentieth-century Paris, a city re-built a generation earlier to facilitate the over-ground circulation of people and commodities along spacious boulevards and the underground clearance of effluvia through capacious drains and sewage channels, technology was deployed not merely to control nature but to replace it with an integrated life-support system that provided the city’s inhabitants with water, food, heating and lighting while also removing unwanted and unhealthy waste products. Far from protecting Parisians from environmental catastrophe, these modern technological systems increased their vulnerability to the vicissitudes of nature, though the scale of the crisis in 1910 was also determined by geographically variable official responses. When the waters finally subsided, the worst loss of life and the greatest damage to property had taken place in the suburbs, a consequence of the decision by prefect of police Louis Lépine, a former governor general of Algeria, to devote his over-stretched resources to saving the architectural and cultural heritage of the city centre. The Louvre was the focus of especially intensive efforts, its priceless treasures preserved from the rising waters by an improvised but effective levée of sandbags, paving stones and top-soil constructed by a small army of labourers working round the clock.

Jackson uncovers ample evidence of selfishness, bureaucratic incompetence, looting and violence, all of which stretched social and political cohesion to its limits, but his conclusion is ultimately up-beat, emphasising the good humour, heroic self-sacrifice and dogged determination of ordinary Parisians, as well as the bravery, efficiency and dedication of the emergency services. In so doing, he makes a significant historical point about the nature of Parisian society in the years before World War One. As that infinitely greater catastrophe would reveal, despite their obvious social, political and geographical divisions, early twentieth-century European cities could be remarkably resilient and surprisingly efficient in times of crisis. This is an important argument though Jackson wisely acknowledges that a sense of orderly efficiency and social cohesion was precisely the message that officials sought to convey in their reports and documents. Newspapers reported tales of looting and violence more readily, of course, sometimes in lurid detail, as did at least one of the aforementioned flood postcards which showed a dramatic re-enactment of a lynching by angry residents in Ivry (p. 171). Jackson might have made more of this rich archive of flood photography but, insofar as this can be construed as an omission, it does not seriously diminish this impressive, well-written book.

MIKE HEFFERNAN
University of Nottingham

Nature’s ubiquitous presence in book titles usually announces a study of the rearrangement of nature to suit the interests and designs of culture. So it is with Jessica Teisch’s work. Her Engineering Nature follows the not-too-original theme of the inventive American in the nineteenth century bent upon altering the natural environment. What stands out here is a fresh conceptual framework - California and the world. That is to say, California’s environment provided an inspiration for talented engineers working in mining, agriculture and urban water supplies to take their careers to new levels on the international stage in the first awakenings of American imperialism. Engineers, and for that matter the energies of ordinary people, changed the face of California’s landscape with dams, reservoirs and water delivery systems. These skills eventually found application in similar environments across the world - Hawaii, Australia, South Africa and even Palestine.

Engineering Nature’s international scope makes it a contribution to the recent burst of ‘settlement literature’ in the Anglophone world that until recently traded in the now out-dated parlance of ‘comparative frontier studies’. Both engage themes of nature-culture interaction, political adaptation, and also the fate of indigenous peoples under pressures of European expansion. In this instance, the international engagement does not occur before a thorough examination of the California experience (engineering water systems for mining, cities, plans for the irrigation of the Central Valley, and the founding of irrigated agricultural cooperative communities in southern California). All of which provided the environmental launching pad for world adventure.

California is a peculiar environment even by American standards. Its Mediterranean climate delivers moderate moisture in the winter and early spring months, but almost none through summer and fall. The topography is a study in diversity. A narrow coastal strip, including San Francisco, enjoys mild and even chilly temperatures in contrast to the hot interior Central Valley bounded to the west by a low coastal mountain range and to the east by the high Sierra. The Sierra foothills rise to form the once mineral-rich Mother Lode Country of the California Gold Rush that put California on the global map and into the global consciousness. California’s northern mountains hold most of the state’s water resources. Teisch stresses the engineering challenges of redistributing water. Water in the mountains served mining, but agricultural users in the valleys and California’s urban coastal centres also demanded a share of the resource. Still, it should be noted that by the end of the Nineteenth Century the hydrological rearrangement of California existed mostly on the drawing boards.

In 1875, on a visit to India, California engineer George Davidson exuded admiration for British irrigation developments, but noted that the top-down administration of the system was impracticable for the American situation. On an investigative sojourn in the 1880s, Alfred Deakin, future prime minister of the drought-plagued island-continent of Australia, established an Australian connection with the American West and future California water engineer Elwood Mead. In what some might consider Teisch’s overly-ambitious exposition, California emerges as the nexus for knowledge exchange. In 1915, the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco celebrated not only the opening of the Panama Canal but also more generally the triumph of technology over nature: an American success story that helped to propel the nation and California into the affairs of the wider world.

Teisch describes Hawaii as an economic province of California. The successful sugar plantations, especially Claus Spreckles’s enterprises, required the talents of California water engineers. William Hammond Hall, first State Engineer of California, was among the first to embark for the islands to assist irrigation and water storage efforts. Hall and his engineer cousin John Hays Hammond eventually found themselves working in South Africa with mining water and engineering problems and even dabbling in the volatile politics that led to the Boer War. In southern California the brothers George and William Benjamin Chandler developed Ontario into a successful agricultural cooperative colony. From there, they took their experiences to Australia where they attempted to replicate the success of Ontario (‘with uneven outcomes’) in Victoria's Murray River Valley.

Teisch seizes upon the career of Elwood Mead as an example to support her world- dimension thesis for the careers of California engineers, although his early connections to California are at best tenuous. Although Mead’s star rose in Wyoming where he pioneered administered water law under a State Engineer’s Office, his career eventually took him to California via the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Along the way he became a critic of the new U.S. Reclamation Service established in the Department of Interior in 1902. His study of the trials and errors of the Reclamation Service gave him an expertise in the development of irrigation communities that brought him to California whence he departed for Australia to direct the building of irrigation settlements in the state of Victoria. He returned to California in 1914 to work at the University of California’s futile efforts to establish state-irrigated communities in the Central Valley at Delhi and Durham. His career also took him to Hawaii to aid in the Native Hawaiian Homestead program, to Palestine to assist Zionist settlements, and eventually to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (formerly Reclamation Service) where he became Commissioner in 1924.

The story assembled by Teisch presents a compelling argument for the prominence of California engineers in water development schemes throughout the world. Yet the argument is a subset of a larger and older thesis that American economic and technological development (from an agricultural to an industrial nation) offered a model for the underdeveloped world to follow. The argument assumed some cogency during the height of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States competed for influence in those parts of the world undergoing decolonisation and the Revolution of Rising Expectations. In effect, these California engineers were forerunners of some of the talented and devoted characters, as well as rogues, described in William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s classic 1958 novel, The Ugly American.

WILLIAM D. ROWLEY
University of Nevada, Reno

Several edited volumes on the scope and character of environmental history have been published recently, as the field tracks its development. Among them this volume presents several distinctive characteristics. As a collection it is diverse and therefore not closely integrated; its variety is deliberate and intriguing. Presenting the work of nearly twenty authors, it features young historians. One virtue of the collection is that it brings a range of research in Finnish to an English-reading audience for the first time. It also includes important coverage of German-speaking and eastern Europe. Outside Europe, papers also consider Sudan, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Australia and the United States.

The editor’s preface, ‘Methods in Environmental History’, recognises a wide variety of methods, a ‘methodological arsenal’, as Myllyntaus calls it. This raises the familiar problem of multidisciplinarity, its confusions and uncertainties. Fiona Watson probes this theme in ‘Interdisciplinarity as Disciplinary Co-operation: A Plea for the Future of Environmental History’, in which she explores complex working relationships among palaeoecologists, soil scientists, ecologists, environmental economists and historians in the interdisciplinarity programme at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Myllyntaus also highlights the value of environmental historians as policy advisors to governments and environmental organisations, in Finland and other European countries. This is not a straightforward matter, as Frank Uekoetter illustrates in an essay on nature protection in Germany under the Nazi regime. Surveying many German conservationists’ choice to work within the Nazi system, he points to ‘a disturbing fact: one did not have to be an ideological fanatic to cooperate with the Nazis. One did not have to be a racist and anti-Semite. ... All that it took was a narrow focus on conservation issues - and a readiness to forget about the rest.’ (pp. 56-57)

Today’s situation is very different, especially regarding climate change and the adaptations that societies will have to face. Myllyntaus notes the field’s reputation as ‘dismal history’, and proposes the value of studies that indicate possible lines of improvement in environmental policy and management. He writes that as the climate challenge increases, ‘... the significance of environmental history will increase. The change may be shocking and society will need explanations as to what has happened in the environment and why profound changes have taken place. In such a situation, environmental history may find a new growth path by being able to assist societies in adapting to significant environmental change’ (p. 11). As climate becomes more unstable, valuable historical perspectives can be derived from this volume’s two studies of social responses to previous natural disasters in Saxony (1784-1845), by Guido Poliwoda, and southwestern Germany (1824), by Jochen Seidel and colleagues.

Professor Myllyntaus uses the European bison as the symbol of the book’s central theme, the decline of natural systems and recent efforts at restoration. The return of the bison exemplifies provisional success in reconciling nature protection with economic development. A somewhat complementary study looks at the history of modifying or domesticating rivers, then restoring them, in Erik Törnlund’s study of timber floating in northern Sweden. Törnlund’s explicit purpose is to use historical knowledge to help guide restoration of a damaged river.

Ethical issues are implicit in several authors’ concerns with the environmental knowledge and adaptations of indigenous cultures. Two essays from Finland feature the Sami people of northern Scandinavia: Helena Ruotsala, ‘Ancestors’ Wisdom or Desktop Reindeer Management? The Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Contemporary Reindeer Herding’, and Jukka Nyssönen, ‘Identity Politics and Alliance Building between the Sami Delegation and Conservationists in the Kessi Forest Dispute’. Lena Rossi adds the individual dimension of nature perception through a study of the Finnish folk painter Frans Lind.

Other studies of individual and cultural perceptions of Nature include two examples from eastern Africa. Anu Eskonheimo’s essay, ‘Desertification - A Significant Problem: Diverse Environmental Literacy in the North Kordofan Area in Sudan’, studies the contrasting perceptual fields of farmers and herders, as they cope with uncertainty and adaptation to severe drought. Timothy Clack, in ‘Thinking Through Memoryscapes: Symbolic Environmental Potency on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania’, writes of ‘indigenous memoryscapes on Mount Kilimanjaro as they pertain to the loci of spiritual power, supernatural agency, attachment to land, ritual activities and religious experience’ (p. 115). This essay adds an essential dimension of consciousness among many traditional cultures, one that industrial-era people often fail to see.

In ‘Perceptions of Place and Deep Time in the Australian Desert: Using Art in Environmental History’, Libby Robin surveys aboriginal art forms, as an extension of her multi-faceted research on aboriginal culture in the demanding outback. She presents this study as an example of science for sustainability. From a strikingly different perspective, the architect Dilshad Rahat Ara surveys architecture, culture and the natural environment in the tribal areas of the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh.

In one of the most clearly articulated statements of theory in the collection, Donald Worster’s essay, ‘Living in Nature: Biography and Environmental History’, presents an incisive consideration of scale of analysis, viewing general issues through the work of two famous American conservationists. Given the distinctively white North American experience of Nature as wilderness, as reflected in the lives of John Wesley Powell and John Muir, this essay suggests the question of how these biographies compare with the significance of Europeans or others whose environmental, institutional and cultural settings were distinctly different.

This volume is in many ways a continuation of themes explored in a previous collection: Marcus Hall, ed., Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past (London: Routledge, 2010). The two volumes together will appeal to many who work for ecological restoration in both university life and public life.

RICHARD TUCKER
University of Michigan

[P]robably grass land, equally with the sea, is to be regarded as one of the corner-stones on which the greatness of the British Empire has been built.¹

The brief of this fine study led by leading scholars of New Zealand’s environment, Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, is to examine the reasons for and consequences of that country’s remarkable transformation from native species to introduced grasslands. Marshalling a team of prominent environmental historians and historical geographers, Seeds of Empire is a multi-faceted study that provides lively and important new perspectives on environmental history. The book is a very successful example of the benefits of collaboration and the richness of perspectives gained therefrom. Also its funding through a New Zealand Government Marsden Grant reinforces the relevance of environmental history to governments and societies today. Indeed, it’s a powerful testimony of the strengths of our discipline at a time when the arts are under threat at so many institutions.

What are the contributions of this book to scholarship? First, as the main authors note, despite its signal importance - economically, environmentally and, not least, politically - there has been remarkably little scholarly attention given to the dramatic process of grasslands transformation, either in New Zealand or, really, worldwide. The primary economy, which the grasslands revolution sustains, remains to this day New Zealand’s most important export earner. It is also responsible for a host of environmental issues which challenge policymakers today: high fertiliser run-off, pollution of waterways, and the long-term viability of using soils in this fashion, to name but a few. As the authors note, ‘only an understanding of the past ... can reveal that strategies adopted many generations ago mould patterns that are hard to break’ (p. 206). This volume therefore fills a significant gap in our understanding of past environmental change and provides deep insight into management issues today.

Second, the work forcibly demonstrates New Zealand’s importance as a case-study of processes of grasslands transformation evident elsewhere, and also as an actor itself in global environmental change. Through innovative use of a variety of rich documentation - visual, statistical and textual - the authors present multiple perspectives on the local and international factors shaping grasslands transformation. Environmental factors (including soil structure, climate, etc.) contributed to the form grasslands modification took, as did colonists’ early environmental learning (sometimes also from Mori), and the role of global capital and markets.

Political issues, likewise, shaped the grasslands transformation. In the nineteenth century private farming enterprise and innovation, the authors show, was supplemented by cautious and limited government support. Following World War One, government science took on a much greater advocacy role - indeed by the 1930s virtually dictating farmers’ choice - of genetically-selected grass and superphosphates. Imperialism aided New Zealand’s cause too. The assumption of the League of Nations mandate of the islands of Nauru and Ocean Island, provided New Zealand (as well as Britain and Australia) with cheap and easy access to guano, thereby helping supplement and artificially maintain high levels of productivity.

As well as providing a fascinating narrative of environmental change - not least in emphasising that there was nothing remotely inevitable about New Zealand’s grasslands transformation - Seeds of Empire also demonstrates wonderfully well the complex patterns of exchanges of technology, seeds and ideas. For example, who knew that a small area of New Zealand (Akaroa peninsula, near Christchurch) in the 1880s to 1920s for a time became a world leading exporter of cocksfoot?

Space prevents me from providing detailed discussion of each chapter’s contribution. Chapters 1 and 2 (Pawson and Brooking) overview the book’s structure and grasslands transformation. Chapters 3 (Peter Holland, Jim Williams and Vaughan Wood) and 4 (Holland, Paul Star and Wood) respectively examine early settler environmental appraisals and knowledge transfers, and experimentation. Chapter 5 (Robert Peden) presents new interpretations of settler use of fire and stocking rates in the high country. Chapter 6 (Jim McAloon) examines flows of capital and trade in establishing the grasslands industry. Chapter 7 (Pawson and Wood) examines seed development and transfer; chapter 8 (Wood and Pawson), flows of agricultural information. Star and Brooking delineate the relationships between the state and science (chapter 9), and later the remaking of the grasslands in the 1920s and 1930s. Brooking and Pawson summarise the main grasslands developments since the Second World War, as well as a synopsis of the book, in the final chapter.

My only minor gripe (directed to the publisher) in this otherwise excellently produced and designed book, is the failure to reference endnotes to the relevant pages of chapters to which they refer.

Seeds of Empire, in short, is a deftly crafted work that should appeal to historical geographers, environmental histories and agricultural historians both inside and outside New Zealand.

1. R.G. Stapledon, A Tour in Australia and New Zealand: Grassland and Other Studies (London, 1928), p.v cited in Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2011), p.1.

JAMES BEATTIE
University of Waikato

In The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil, Thomas D. Rogers examines the harsh labour and environmental realities of sugar cane production in the northeast of Brazil through the twentieth century. The book’s central argument is that ‘modernising’ the sugar environment during the second half of the twentieth century and the consequent reshaping of labour practices did not lessen the ‘twinned domination of land and labor’ (p. 1) that originated with colonial, slave-based plantations. Rogers interprets political mobilisation of sugar workers and violence against them in the 1960s and 1970s within this framework.

The Deepest Wounds is eloquent in demonstrating the naturalism with which elite writers imbued their integration of landscape and the labour needed to profit from that landscape. Rogers draws deeply on the well-known writings of Gilberto Freyre, José Lins do Rego, Joaquim Nabuco and early travellers, such as Daniel Kidder, Henry Koster and L.F. Tollenare to describe the inseparability of slavery and the sugar landscape. This background reinforces the continuity between historical reality and the introduction of science-based expansion of sugar production that began in the 1930s. Modernising the sugar industry in the second quarter of the twentieth century involved completing the transition from small engenhos to large usinas as the locus of milling cane and either producing or accumulating the cane. Modernisation also meant the introduction of new cane varieties, especially the variety X3, which was especially pernicious in environmental effects and labour requirements. Reorganisation of labour tasks and compensation, from pay-for-time (a daily wage) to pay for quantum (essentially, piecework), accompanied new production processes. Practices also resulted in workers becoming alienated from the land; by the last half of the twentieth century, land-ownership was no longer an ideal for workers. Further, with the emergence of a large and centralised state, ‘[t]he metaphor of captivity remained ubiquitous ... Escape less frequently depended on the power-soaked relations with a senhor than on a new, evolving relationship with the state, one still marked by asymmetries of power’ (p. 177). However, through the last decades of the twentieth century, possibilities for addressing grievance arose through two socio-political changes. The displacement of the senhor by the state as the locus of power created bureaucratic mechanisms for challenging labour practices, however assymetrical, cumbersome and slow they proved to be. Finally, the rise of political activism from the Left and from the Catholic Church offered the means for direct action, that workers increasing took in the 1960s and 1970s.

Human action on the environment and human perceptions of the environment are the core concerns of environmental history. This manuscript falls heavily in the second category, concern with perception. The narrative is interesting, and it is a potentially important perspective on the persistence of profound poverty, oppression and environmental destruction of the Northeast. The description of labour conditions and power relations in the sugar producing regions of the northeast is compelling. The analysis of landscape/environment and the connection between labour and environment are plausible, but less well supported. The methods and evidence that the author invokes leave much room for connecting perception and rhetoric with material reality. The analysis of elite discourse and the use of oral interviews with cane workers are enlightening and they are good reading. However, without establishing their broader context, opposing perspectives and the extent to which they are representative, these sources cannot stand on their own.

This problem is most evident in the consideration of the environmental effects of cane modernisation. Some of the questions that arise include: What was the extent of the increase in cane production in the Zona da Mata, and how did this region fit into the national pattern of sugar cane expansion? What were the causal links between environmental destruction and labour oppression? Why would sub-regional differences in cane production result in differing labour activism strategies during the strikes of 1963 (pp. 138–139)? How can we assess the strategy of burning the cane fields as a form of protest in the 1950s and 1960s without being able to confidently distinguish between fields burned in labour protest, as part of a harvesting technique or as a way of jumping the queue at the mill (pp. 142–153)? Is the release of ash and carbon dioxide released into the air in the 1970s (117,000 and 109,300 kilograms/day) a lot or a little? In the shift of payment criteria from time to piecework (pp. 116–120), what was the effect on workers’ standard of living? In discussing the interaction between the labour and environment with the ‘modernisation’ of sugar during the 1960s and 1970s, worker interviews illuminate that increased flooding furthered ‘how the workers know the severity of nature’. While this reader is willing to believe that the expansion of cane production was a causal element in the increased flooding, a discussion of that causality would have been useful.

A certain ahistoricity of ideas also emerges within the narrative of The Deepest Wounds. The military government’s emphasis on coordinating large scale production at the national level and the state government’s response to flooding by building dams may not be solutions of democratic governments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; but they were well within mainstream thinking about economic development of their period, regardless of political orientation. Rogers’ assertion that the connection between building dams and ‘the state’s management of labor relationships[:] Water was a resource (and potential energy) to be managed; workers were energy to be managed’ (pp. 188–189) does not explain the particular forms and consequences of management applied to each resource. None of these questions or concerns about important components of the book’s argument, by themselves, is definitive in assessing the book; their cumulative effect reinforces the privileging of perception over action as the book’s focus.

Rogers is convincing that [a] ‘perspective that naturalizes hierarchies can similarly naturalize the place of workers at the bottom of those hierarchies’ (p. 189). The Deepest Wounds demonstrates that the cane producing regions of the Brazilian northeast naturalise hierarchies with workers at the bottom. However, that outcome is not necessary; so, we still do not know why it was the outcome in this place and time. Further, the causal connections between the environment and on workers remain subject to debate. Notwithstanding these concerns, The Deepest Wounds is invaluable for understanding the environmental destruction and poverty of the region and for a demonstration of the use of landscape for establishing a larger view of the social relations.

GAIL D. TRINER
Rutgers University

This book explores two areas which have received less prominence in mainstream environmental history than the more tradition concerns of man and nature: urban environmental history and social or environmental justice. Based on a session at the European Association of Urban Historians’ conference with some additional commissioned pieces, it includes contributions from Europe and North America covering over 700 years of environmental development touching on both the management of natural resources and the impact of human interventions. The twelve chapters are split into five sections with cross-cutting themes, such as the interactions of urban and rural, the role of the state, business and elites and the intended and unintended consequences of economic, social and environmental change.

The book opens with an attempt to define and understand environmental justice and inequality in both North American and European contexts. Central to the traditional understanding, derived from work in North America, is a concern with racism built on a suspicion that much environmental injustice, especially when it affects minorities, is consciously enacted. The editors, while questioning the weakness of environmental justice in Europe – in ideological, social and historiographical terms – shy away from adopting the North American model, a position largely justified by the findings of the individual chapters. Indeed, these even begin to question the link between injustice and racial minorities in America, noting that the dynamics of urban development and redevelopment result in constantly shifting neighbourhood social structures. As a result formerly white middle-class areas, with strongly developed environmental amenities, may become home to African American families, as seen in Baltimore by Buckley and Boone, whilst the prosperous populations of gentrifying inner city areas, like those in Joanna Dean’s Ottawa, may still have relatively few. Similarly, the need to provide environmental protection to the white middle class may result in a state policy which also benefits minority communities, as Colten observes in his contribution on pre-Katrina New Orleans. However, the issue of ethnic or racial minorities is of limited concern to the contributors addressing European subjects.

Rather it is class which dominates as the key determinant of environmental injustice. Access to wealth and political power was the surest way to maximise environmental goods and minimise dis-amenities while those with less money or power invariably experienced amenity deficient and degraded environments. This was particularly so with access to resources such as water and fuel but also when considering security from natural threats to economic or personal livelihood or the ability to avoid the siting of pollutants in one’s surroundings. Thus, as Jonas Hallström demonstrates for nineteenth-century Sweden, new working class suburbs found it very difficult to gain access to adequate water supplies, with town elites blocking requests from fear of increased cost. Similarly, Marcus Stippak shows workers’ suburbs in industrialising Germany initially benefitted from a willingness amongst local elites to provide improved services but these were then allowed to decay, especially in the face of intransigence from external bodies such as landowners. The poor were not always weak, however, as can be seen by the effective mobilisation of the Belgian workers against river pollution in the late nineteenth century. In this case, as revealed by Chloé Deligne and Wanda Balcers, around cities like Liege and Ghent anglers’ societies mounted a vociferous campaign to see rivers cleaned up and industrialists prosecuted. They built alliances with some bourgeois supporters and achieved limited success when their case was taken up by the labour movement and generalised to an issue of health – though this interest did not survive the First World War.

Those with wealth and power showed themselves able to secure the best environments and the greatest access to resources. Richard Oram’s exploration of the transition of urban Scotland from wood and peat to coal as a source of domestic fuel shows that as scarcity and fashion pushed the better-off to switch to coal the management of and access to non-coal sources of fuel changed in ways which disadvantaged the poor. Supplies of wood and peat declined, even in rural areas, while the enormous cost of transporting coal pushed the price beyond the pockets of most urban Scots. The effects of the changing needs and fashions of the urban elite also had severe consequences for communities living in the flood risk areas of the North Sea coast in the medieval and early modern period. Changes in land ownership and in the interests of wealthy town dwellers served to weaken flood defences in Kent, Belgium and Holland, with the result, Tim Soens suggests, that populations declined and livelihoods and even lives were threatened. In these cases the environmental injustices were the unintended consequences of other social changes, especially in land ownership, rather than the result of deliberate policies as contended by some theorists.

Indeed, across these essays there is evidence that environmental disadvantage was a contested issue, especially when it came to the disposal of waste and the impact of new technologies. The difficulties faced by modernist urban planners seeking to develop technological solutions to the growing mountain of human, industrial and domestic garbage are illustrative of these divergent agenda. Thus in Brandenburg Christoph Bernhardt found considerable resistance from rural interests to the move away from sewage farming, whilst Stéphane Frioux’s findings suggest the urban French were never completely convinced that the incineration of garbage was an improvement on carting. Similar confusion could be found amongst business leaders and urban elites when it came to industrial environments, as Janet Greenlees’ essay makes clear. Focused on the New England textile trade of the early twentieth century, she shows that industrialists could take very different decisions about the need to deploy new technology to meet both commercial and employee welfare ends. Such decisions could be shaped by external factors, such as state pressure or community influence, but in most cases it would appear that conventional investment strategies predominated and that environmental benefits were usually unintended by products.

Overall, this is a useful collection, which begins to place the issue of urban environmental inequalities on the European research agenda. Although the essays are very disparate, exploring a wide range of temporal, spatial and thematic examples, there are underlying continuities and connections which make this a worthwhile introduction to this important methodological approach.

BARRY M. DOYLE
University of Huddersfield

Whilst at first glance the water deer, the monk parakeet and the slipper limpet are perhaps not the most obvious of bedfellows, what they share in common is their inclusion on the DEFRA list of non native species considered to pose a threat to the indigenous non human life in Great Britain. Whilst the Mongolian gerbil and the Himalayan porcupine have been removed from this hit list of the floral and faunal most wanted, during the recent years over 60 species have been added, from the conspicuous wild boar trampling the ferns in the Forest of Dean to the Chinese mitten crabs scurrying over Greenwich river banks. Even the most rudimentary of looks at the protagonists that populate this list would suggest that from avifauna to algae, from rhododendrons to rodents, non native species are very much ‘oversexed, overpaid, overfed and over here’.

As highlighted by the various campaigns and projects of the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity, the homogenisation of ecosystems brought about through the movement of a veritable mass of floral and fauna is justifiably considered to rank amongst the most significant of threats posed to the health of different environments and habitats around the world; its resolution similarly conspicuous amongst the most daunting to address. During the crafting of the various campaigns and projects in 2010, it seems that above all those orchestrating the International Year of Biodiversity, rallied themselves in line with the axiom ‘Thinking Globally, Acting Locally’ formulated at the Rio Conference in 1992, seeking to safeguard biodiversity on a manageable localised level so as to reap enormous dividends when culminating on a global scale. However the relatively recent nature of these campaigns and legislation betrays the historic roots of the spirit and essence that drove their formulation: Alfred Crosby’s often cited ‘Colombian Exchange’ and the expansion of Europe’s portmanteau biota into new environments and habitat as early as the fourteenth century. During the early years of these intrepid voyages of discovery, those embarking on them were accompanied by a ‘grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world altering avalanche’ of four legged, furred, finned and floral protagonists whose arrival irrevocable and irreversibly changed the new landscapes in which they found themselves, a reciprocal process which in course similarly altered their native homeland. Thoroughly documented by the extensive works of Charles Elton, the aggressive nature of introduced species introduced either intentionally or accidentally into environments in which they are non-indigenous, whilst rather vividly depicted by grey squirrels reputedly mutilating the genitals of their red cousins, can be a largely unseen process. However, the minimal visual impact often belies a far greater and wide reaching impact, often spanning centuries. Subsequently a large number of the species generally considered to be vital constituents of a, for example, quintessentially British faunal assemblage are in fact those ‘alien’ species against which organisations such as DEFRA now rail. This in turn therefore poses a number of questions in debating the nature of what is and what is not ‘native’, questions such as how long a species has to be present before deemed native, how long an absence merits exclusion from this status, and how long it takes for this status to be acquired again. The case of the wild boar, and indeed the beaver, in Great Britain are poignant examples, as is the wolf in on the European continent and in North America. Canis lupus is an interesting example of a species currently repopulating large swathes of Europe, both naturally and through introductions conducted by human communities. My own qualitative research into these issues in northern Italy indicates that should the wolves in this part of the peninsula be proven to be a separate genus to those in the rest of Europe – namely Canis lupus italianicus, as suggested by Altobello in 1921 – then in fact the populace may have different opinions as to their reappearance. Are these therefore examples of ‘Strangers in a Familiar Land’?

Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes and Approaches to Management is a collection of 24 superbly written essays that draw on the expertise of a wide range of academics and professions from diverse areas of Europe, North America and Australasia. Topped and tailed by thematic chapters outlining the past, present and potential future prospects and developments in the debate and discussion surrounding the status of species, native and alien, this collection of essays edited by Ian D. Rotherham and Robert A. Lambert provides an eloquent and coherent synthesis of this intrinsically interdisciplinary area of study, producing an enormously fascinating and enjoyable volume of undoubted utility to readers both new and well seasoned in the principles of the field. The collection of 13 case-studies concerning the species histories of particular plants and animals in particular environments at particular times excellently provides a holistic understanding of the subject matter disclosed in the introductory and concluding thematic chapters, exemplifying the theory and ideas raised in these sections, embedding them in specific examples, thereby perfectly illustrating the highly contemporary nature of the work being undertaken, as they do the multiple and varied interest groups embroiled within them. Throughout these case-studies, the contributors have perfectly succeeded in adhering to the calls made by Jim Dickson in 1996 at the Battleby Scottish Natural Heritage meeting for the essence of species history to lie in a combination of ‘good science, good history and pragmatism’. In doing so, the combination of the ecological, socio-cultural and political lives of the various species outlined in this volume, when read alongside other works produced by Earthscan, such as Richard Francis’s A Handbook of Global Freshwater Invasive Species, illustrates by excellent examples the manner in which a holistic and thorough understanding of mankind’s complex and changing relationships with the non human over time can have a genuine and tangible application and impact on the conception, formulation and institution of management measures of both native and alien species, and the prominent role semiotics play in forging our perceptions of and attitudes towards the ‘non-native’. Abounding with parallels with the human world, Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes and Approaches to Management is a book to recommend without hesitation.

ROBERT ALEXANDER HEARN
University of Genoa

In this remarkable collection, SueEllen Campbell and her authors have produced an inspiring volume that kindles a sense of wonderment about our home, planet Earth. The Face of the Earth not only fosters wonder in its reader, but it also takes this sensation as its subject as ‘[t]his world invites endless wonder’ (p. 285). The authors undertake a sophisticated and varied exploration of how the Earth has provoked fascination in the world’s peoples from the earliest hominids, and how such marvelling has produced and shaped innumerable scientific, literary, artistic and philosophical inquiries into the natural world, the human place within it, and the human condition.

Campbell has assembled a dazzling array of expertise to depict this spectacular kaleidoscope of stories. Represented here are writers of environmental literature, ecocriticism and creative nonfiction, as well as geologists, poets, climate scientists, environmental historians, philosophers and environmental educators. Although their focus is largely on the Anglo-world of Britain, Ireland, the United States and Australia, they also study Antarctica, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. They take care in their studies of these non-Anglo places and colonised lands to ruminate on the roles of language and vocabulary in moulding the ways that English speakers in particular have understood and experienced place. These experiences are contrasted with the knowledges and ecologies of indigenous peoples to reveal the diversity of meanings imbued in a place.

The collection is structured around five chapters, loosely based on the classical elements of earth, fire, air, water and ether or quintessence. Although these elements are difficult to extricate, the authors perform an admirable job of teasing out the strands to show the overwhelming complexities of the way the Earth works, how people feel about the Earth, and the ‘health’ of the Earth itself. Throughout the volume, the reader remains grounded through the interspersion of personal essays about the unique and individual experiences of a certain place at a certain time. These insights combine with the vast survey of literature, art and philosophy to refresh the stories about place and nature that are so often associated with the likes of Thoreau and Leopold.

In the first chapter, Campbell examines landscapes of fire, where she takes her reader inside the boiling belly of the Earth and out through its fiery vents of volcanoes, ash columns and hot springs. We visit Kilauea volcano in Hawai’i, the Tobacco Root Mountains in Montana, Stromboli near Sicily, Mount Saint Helens, and southern Chile’s Chaitén volcano. Such landscapes of ‘geological violence’ have been ‘key shapers of human myths, religions, natural philosophies and sciences’ (p. 4). Campbell also ponders how wonder and curiosity, and their emotional implications, have changed over time. Here, Campbell lays the bedrock for the chapters to follow: that the two cultures are not so separate, as practitioners of the sciences and the arts each mine the vocabularies of the other to tell the stories of the Earth; that both their inquiries are prompted by the same seed: wonder. We need only turn to the works of Alighieri, Milton and Verne to find the fruits of fertile artistic and scientific imaginations.

Campbell also contributes the following chapter, in which she explores the complexities of the Earth’s climates and the transformative forces of ice. We embark to the chilly climes of the Himalaya, the Burren of Ireland, the Arctic Tundra, and the Channelled Scablands and Mount Baker of the United States. She explains the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes of the Earth’s climates and their change over time, and how these changes have affected plants, animals and people. She also unravels the secrets of the ice and how it has fashioned the Earth’s surfaces over millennia. Scientists utilise these icy trails and other traces of climates past to predict the direction and magnitude of future climate changes and the implications of these for the Earth’s biota. The ice itself tells tales, while inspiring human stories of glacier literature, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); of Arctic and Antarctic explorations; and of philosophy, such as Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986). And in the ice, considers Campbell, we might turn for guidance as we face uncertain climate futures.

With the help of fellow writers of environmental literature, Richard Kerridge and Tom Lynch, and geologist Ellen Wohl, Campbell tours the Earth’s wetlands, some of which lie in the least likely of places. The authors take the reader to south-eastern Alaska, to Costa Rica, to a bog in the west of Ireland, to Cambridgeshire and to a billabong in northern Australia. Water, they explain, is inseparable from the way we live – we need it to survive, we build our settlements near it, and it is the root of countless meanings and metaphors. We thirst for it and dream of it, leading many cultures to undertake great engineering works to control where, when and how it flows. But we also fear water, particularly the way it blurs boundaries and conceals, defying definition. They are Bunyan’s Slough of Dispond in The Pilgrim’s Progress and Tolkein’s ‘Dead Marshes’, backwaters and sources of disease. This long distrust of damp bogs, fens, wetlands and their inhabitants often led to their destruction and has arguably delayed their scientific study, which commenced only in the last several decades. Yet they are vital habitats, not only to flocks of migratory birds but also to ancient peoples, as the Neolithic settlements and stories of the Australian Aborigines of our textual visits attest. They too are places of wonder.

In the fourth chapter, Lynch and Campbell examine the Earth’s driest places, its deserts, and the lives that they sustain. We venture down the Yampa in the Dinosaur National Monument; up the Aja’ mountains of northern Saudi Arabia; out to the Chihuahuan Desert; into the Red Centre of Australia; and across Israel’s Negev Desert. We learn of astonishing feats of plant and animal adaptation to the pulses of the desert like the baobab and the oryx, and consider the ways that human societies have long survived in these seemingly barren lands. They are a source for wonder indeed – ‘[y]ou just have to know where to look for it’ (p. 184). Whether in the wave-like dunes, the dust storms, the mirages, or in their solitude, deserts have long inspired science, art and faiths. After all, the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all born in the desert. Scientifically, spiritually, artistically, the Earth’s deserts ‘offer lessons for us all of adaptation, flexibility, toughness and resilience’ (p. 240).

In the final chapter, Campbell and Alex Hunt, a fellow writer of environmental literature, map the complexity of seemingly simple landscapes, where there tends to be ‘more going on than first meets our eye, more even than we might imagine’ (p. 241). We seek this complexity in Antarctica, the prairies of north-eastern Illinois, the Tibetan Plateau, and the eucalypt forest of the Dandenong Ranges in eastern Australia. The planet’s grasslands, forests and woodlands, like its deserts, are incredibly diverse areas, shaped by tectonic forces, the sun’s warmth, the climate, grazing and fire. They are also places of flux, of change, where grasses can seem to swell like ocean waves, and where human settlements expand and contract according to the pulses of climate and the economy, as portrayed in the vast literature of the 1930s Dust Bowl and in the film documentaries of the socioeconomic changes underway in pastoral Mongolia.

The collection’s interdisciplinarity echoes that of the Desert Channels project undertaken in Australia’s Channel Country (reviewed in Environment and History, November 2011). Where that project sought to inspire the ‘impulse to conserve’ that particular region’s unique ecologies and (hi)stories, The Face of the Earth seeks to evoke such a desire for the entire planet. The technologies of the past century provide a means to view and comprehend its great wonder, of the intricate webs that bind us all together. Satellite images and aerial photography, such as Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth From Above (2002), ‘[S]how us in a way that is both intellectual and emotional that our world is not limitless, that its pied beauty requires our care’ (p. 292). The contributors interweave their many stories to reveal the myriad connections between past, present and future; people and place; time and space; near and far; science and art, to reveal ‘this intricate, mutable fabric’ that is Earth (p. 286).

The volume as a whole presents its reader with a tantalising fusion of environmental history and history of science, and of travelogue and essay, each offering stories of wonder and hope. Although the contributors to this collection have vividly described the many ‘faces’ of the earth to produce an eminently readable volume, the addition of images, such as maps, photographs and paintings, could have greatly amplified their writings and enhanced the sense of wonder so tangible in their words. Readers can turn to the annotated bibliography for further study, although a more exhaustive list of sources would also appeal to an academic audience.

The world depicted in the scientific, literary, historical, artistic and philosophical stories of The Face of the Earth is indeed a source for wonder. Whether this wonder derives from pleasure or fear, from hope or despair, it is wonder nonetheless. And it will inspire readers to rediscover this wonder in their own world in ‘being here, now’ (p. 295).

RUTH MORGAN

In many churches and graveyards in Australia and New Zealand, you can find monuments to people who have had careers in the East India Company, in the Crown’s imperial administration in India, or in the military there. These are the physical reminders of a phenomenon which is central to this book, the connections between various aspects of environmental policy in South Asia and in Australasia. For James Beattie, these connections between ‘extractive’ and ‘settler’ colonies have been insufficiently noticed and he has now gone a long way to redressing the balance. He is intrigued by the manner in which concepts of a progressive economic order could go together with forms of environmental anxiety. In many respects this dichotomy represents the conflict between science and the free market which seems to be a feature of modern times – manifested in the development of state forestry policies, theories about desiccation, erosion and other environmental phenomena, and their hesitant acceptance in the laissez-faire settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps the very familiar modern disputes between the protagonists of human-induced global warming and the free market developmental camp constitute a further expression of this sense of embattled sciences.

Another theme of the book is the manner in which professionalisation in these scientific fields proceeded in the later nineteenth century, particularly encouraged perhaps in the more autocratic atmosphere of British India than in the often chaotic politics of settler ‘responsible government’. That seems to explain the early development of state forestry policies in India and the lively debates that took place there about both human and environmental health, tropical medicine, social and environmental conditions, and the dangers posed both by and to indigenous peoples. But, as Beattie effectively points out, such debates were very much subject to local problems and conditions. Grand theorisation was always modified according to the perceived mix of climate, environment, botanical resources, indigenous ‘threat’ and the economic ambitions of white administrators or settlers. Out of these basic materials, he builds an impressive picture of debates about trees, about single species like the eucalyptus, about hill stations, architecture, urban conditions, public parks and gardens, the seaside and much else.

But the truly impressive thing about this book is that Beattie takes the discussion beyond the fields of scientific, intellectual and political discussion. In the opening sequence of chapters he examines the origins of environmental anxieties and then in turn of health and aesthetic anxieties. In the latter one, he discusses the aesthetics of environmental degradation, as particularly viewed by the artist and writer Alfred Sharpe who emigrated from England and lived in both New Zealand and New South Wales. From these, he goes on to analyse the now familiar role of Scots-educated doctors in environmental observation and discussion, demonstrating that their focus was different when comparisons are made between India and Australasia. And these Scots invariably interacted with German foresters and scientists who are the other European ethnic group most prominent in these debates. Many of these figures contributed to extraordinarily vibrant networks that also drew in islands like Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Mauritius, as well as other territories in the Americas, in Africa or in South-East Asia. The final chapters examine the interaction of South Asia and Australasia in respect of anxieties about the destruction of forests and the development of state policies of sustainable development and, finally, the drifting sands problem in many agricultural areas of the territories and the measures taken to overcome these apparently frightening and extensive incursions.

All of this makes for a richly textured book in which Beattie produces interesting and effective revisions of the work of such scholars as Richard Grove. It is clear to anyone who has read the accounts of observers, travellers, botanists, foresters and others that environmental anxiety was indeed one of the central characteristics of the imperial condition. All seemed to recognise that the advancing incursions of both major extractive policies and the demands of settler agriculture, not to mention urban growth, railway building and other infrastructural provision were all transforming environments in apparently alarming – and strikingly interconnected – ways. It was hoped that science in the guise of both observational practice and the consequent construction of remedial policies would save the day. Such science did indeed emerge from a botanically based medicine and from the travels of botanists plant hunting and establishing economic gardens, but it soon fanned out into a whole sequence of more specialised studies which by the end of the nineteenth century began at last to have expression in the foundation of chairs, the establishment of university departments, and the creation of more specialist degrees.

But perhaps Beattie’s major contribution has been to emphasise anew the international character of imperial environmental discussions, drawing on the particular specialisms of different European countries and of the four nations of the United Kingdom. This was abundantly apparent in my own research on the development of museums throughout the British Empire and their connections with the emergence of imperial science. So too was the sense that we place imperial territories into rigidly demarcated categories at our peril. In the past it has been traditional to think of India as an entirely separate Empire, with other ‘empires’ in the British system made up of settler territories, the so-called ‘dependent’ empire as well as the empire of oceanic islands and trading posts. Just as environmental conditions are no respecters of human-created boundaries and frontiers, it is also apparent that this ‘packaging’ of empire does not work, however much it may appear to do so in administrative and political terms. The connections between India and Australasia – as well as to oceanic islands and other colonies in South and East Africa, North America and elsewhere – are abundantly apparent. Not only has Beattie gone a long way to demonstrating this proposition conclusively, he has also written an eminently readable, diverse, and thoroughly enjoyable, as well as stimulating, book.

JOHN M. MACKENZIE

‘Rabies is a terrible way to die.’ Karen Browns first sentence immediately sets the stage for a compelling history of one of the most gruesome epidemic diseases that affect both humans and animals. Spanning more than two centuries, from the first reports on rabies in the Cape region to today’s post-Apartheid South Africa, Karen Brown brilliantly shows how this disease – like all diseases – is entangled in a variety of contexts and circumstances. In seven chapters Brown is not only writing a history of rabies in colonial and post-colonial Southern Africa but shows how medical history can be as much environmental history as it is the history of ideas and of course social history.

In the introductory chapter, Brown provides the reader with the general trajectory of the book and a concise introduction to the historiography of rabies. Not surprisingly the latter is rather limited so far and one hopes that Karen Brown’s book inspires further studies on the history of rabies. Brown’s book is especially indebted to Michael Worboys and Neil Pemberton’s book on rabies in nineteenth-century Britain, Mad Dogs and Englishmen (2007). Here, additional research in European languages other than English may well have contributed to expand the picture. Alas, the historiography on rabies in, for example, Germany or France is as scarce as that in the Anglo-Saxon world. Brown continues with a helpful section on the biology of the rabies virus and a brief chronology of rabies outbreaks in Southern Africa. Here, she already makes an important point that will occur time and again in her book: ‘History shows that human rabies in South Africa is a consequence of poverty, ignorance, political incompetence, and neglect’ (p. 10). Environmental factors especially, as well as apartheid and the political economy of HIV/AIDS, have contributed to the spread and devastating impact of rabies. Brown finishes the introductory chapter with a summary of the important themes of her book. Here, she already highlights some of her findings and stresses the following topics that she will address: 1) human-animal interaction, 2) cultural impact of wildlife perception, 3) socio-economic impact: the ‘Columbian Exchange’, 4) medical knowledge: western and colonial, 5) the role of the state, and 6) social anxieties. The achievement of Mad Dogs and Meerkats is precisely that Karen Brown manages to relate all this topics to one another and all through the time periods she is concerned with. Of course, different times saw a stronger or weaker effect of one or the other of the topics.

Chapter One is concerned with the situation in colonial Southern Africa. This chapter acknowledges widely-known findings of the postcolonial history of medicine. The trope of the Tropics as the ‘white man’s grave’ and climatic interpretations of disease are to be found also in the perception of rabies in nineteenth-century Southern Africa. Karen Brown traces the somewhat shadowy history of rabies before 1893 (the first recorded outbreak). This is not a simple task, as evidence is scarce and contradictory. Nonetheless, Brown’s analysis of the debates on whether rabies existed before the turn of the twentieth century makes an interesting case in point. Rather surprisingly, wildlife did not play a part in the stories, and the disease was only conceptualised in relation to canines. Predictably, African statements do not occur in the colonial literature on the subject. The scarcity of sources was also due to the infrequency of the occurrence in the eyes of the colonial travellers and administrators. It mainly depended on the length of the authors’ stay in Southern Africa. During the course of the nineteenth century, newly developed ideas in the history of medicine, like the germ theory of disease, influenced the conceptualisation of rabies in Southern Africa. The rise of the laboratory as the main site of medical investigation played its part as well. The development of the sub-disciplines of medicine coincided with the further development of state bureaucracies. However, the compilation of medical knowledge was still also localised.

Brown accordingly turns to a local story in the second chapter: the Port Elizabeth rabies epidemic at the end of the nineteenth century. This is the first documented outbreak in South African history. The archival and published sources reveal a growing influence of veterinary authority and administrative regulation, albeit with still widespread reluctance of the general public to adhere to these regimes. Already in the Port Elizabeth epidemic, social and racial tensions were apparent. White middle-class dog owners enforced the belief that Africans and their dogs were especially infective. Bubonic plague and Rinderpest, which occurred in the decades before and after 1900, additionally contributed to new tensions.

In her third chapter, Brown moves away from the coast to Southern Rhodesia and a rabies epidemic that occurred from 1901 to 1913. This chapter provides insight into the spread of rabies in the region. The contested attempts of veterinarian scientists to widen their influence are only one part of the story. Another is the neglect by Europeans to make use of local knowledge in evaluate their experiences. Interestingly African (here Barotse) knowledge of, and experience with, rabies reflected ideas and practices of western medicine. But this was of course disregarded by the colonial powers. The indigenous dog owners accepted the culling policies of the colonial state exactly because it resonated with their own methods. Additionally, attempts to implement vaccination show how racial policies had a strong influence on veterinary policies and illustrate the asymmetrical power relations between colonised and coloniser. However, this also created tensions within the colonial administration, especially between the native affairs department and the veterinary department. Disease control had to be matched with concerns for internal security and public order. Hence, rural populations had a considerable influence on whether or not certain regulations could be implemented on the ground. This resonates well with the recent research on (early) modern state practices concerning epidemics and diseases.

The fourth chapter deals with another species that became the main focus in the 1920s and 1930s: the yellow mongoose, or meerkat. Formerly considered a harmless animal, it attracted scientific attention as the primary vector of rabies in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter draws special attention to the epidemiology of rabies in mongoose, how the virus found an ideal mammalian niche and became enzootic. It also analyses the mid-twentieth-century hubris of scientific efforts to control nature and wildlife. The attempts to exterminate mongoose in order to eradicate the disease were extraordinary but became more and more contested in the late 1970s when state-sponsored gassing of mongoose burrows was finally abandoned due to ethical and practical concerns.

Another wild animal, the jackal, is the subject matter of Chapter Five. Here, the canines return as vectors of rabies in the 1950s. Although it is impossible to discern why the epidemiology of rabies changed at that point in time, the ‘jackalisation of rabies’ can be attributed to the development of infrastructure (roads and railway), the commercialisation of agriculture and growing labour migrancy. As the countryside was especially vulnerable it became clear that rabies threatened both subsistence and commercial farmers. Quarantine was complemented with newly developed vaccination but these strategies had become difficult to administer when war hit Zimbabwe in the 1970s. As a result of political turmoil and collapsing infrastructure, rabies increased dramatically.

The impact of war and conflict on rabies-control programmes are exemplified in the sixth chapter on the ‘Urbanisation of Rabies in KwaZulu-Natal’. Karen Brown highlights the recurrent problems already mentioned in earlier chapters. At the same time, she points to crucial differences such as the impact of domestic animals (above all: dogs), impoverished townships, weak infrastructure in remote areas and mass urbanisation. Again violence and dysfunctional government played an important role in undermining attempts at rabies control. In her last chapter, Karen Brown summarises her findings and highlights the interconnection between HIV/AIDS and rabies that she already hinted at in chapter six. HIV/AIDS related deaths resulted in an exceptional growth of the number of stray dogs and thereby accelerated the spread of rabies. The book is finished with a welcome outlook on further research in the histories of rabies.

Well narrated and drawn from a rich variety of sources, Mad Dogs and Meerkats is a fine example of medical history today. Brown uses many examples to highlight the wide range of social, cultural and medical issues that were and are at stake here. As in many recent medical histories of epidemics, questions of the nature of power relations and scientific endeavour are central to the book and rightly so. From the point of view of the history human-animal relations rabies proofs to be an interesting case in point. The disease does not only spread from animal vectors to humans but the disease itself seems to ‘dehumanise’ its victims. As well as it ‘brutalises’ animals. Environmental historians will welcome Karen Brown’s strong emphasis on the ecological contexts and impacts of rabies.

DOMINIK HÜNNIGER
University of Göttingen

In recent years historians have demonstrated how business in the United States worked to gain ever-greater influence over the nation’s political system during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers lobbied, bankrolled and wrote legislation while waging massive public relations campaigns to convince the public that the desires of business were synonymous with the interests of citizens. But, as Sarah S. Elkind makes plain in an interesting and important contribution to this body of work, business also went to work to convince the public, and especially lawmakers, that its goals were likewise best for the environment.

While other studies have explored national organisations and politics, Elkind focuses on how power was also flowing outward from local business elites to influence both local and national policy. In five case studies centred on a booming Los Angeles from1920 through the early 1950s, she explores how business associations dominated local politics on environmental issues and influenced federal policy. Because they possessed superior means to frame local discourse, draft legislation, and conduct studies on contentious issues to provide the appearance of an objective basis for the actions of local politicians, business groups successfully insinuated themselves as the voice of the people. Opposition groups simply could not match their resources, public appeal (business provided jobs), or access to officials.

In Elkind’s first case study, conservation and local business elites were in relative harmony. By 1930, on the heels of the discovery of major oil fields in the L.A. Basin, oil derricks dotted area beaches, placing nearly all of them off-limits to the public. Powerful local business leaders, who favoured tourism and other commercial developments, formed the Shoreline Planning Association to push legislation banning seaside oil wells and creating public beaches. Six on its board of directors were chamber of commerce officers (p. 41). Although the public also desired beaches free from oil derricks for recreation and aesthetics, the general citizenry was never really part of the decision-making process. In a method repeated throughout the book, local business leaders successfully situated themselves as the voice of the people and controlled discourse and policy.

Public and business interests were even less harmonious in Elkind’s remaining case studies. In the case of air pollution, citizens first demanded official action to improve the city’s air during the summer of 1943, when smog grew so blindingly bad that it was blamed for daytime car accidents. But the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce immediately went to work to position itself as the official voice of the public, leveraging its considerable influence with elected officials to thwart any pollution regulations so stringent that they might hamper business and industry.

The remaining cases concern an issue paramount to the environmental history of Los Angeles: water. The powerful Long Beach Chamber of Commerce pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to build the Whittier Narrows Dam in the San Gabriel Valley in order to protect coastal businesses and properties from flooding. In the process it drowned the voices of some 5,000 residents and small farmers near the proposed dam who, facing the loss of their homes beneath its reservoirs, instead urged river channel improvements that would contain rain-swelled rivers without sacrificing their dwellings. The dam was completed in 1957, flooding their homes and farms.

Even more dramatic was the spectacular Hoover Dam. Built on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, its origins lie in California’s Imperial Valley where farmers were desperate for irrigation water. When the federal Bureau of Reclamation proposed a multiple-use dam that could also provide public power to energy-hungry L.A. while simultaneously subsidising dam construction and irrigation, private utility companies and their allies in local chambers of commerce, banks, and other business stalwarts tried to block its construction on the grounds that public power posed a serious socialistic threat. Ultimately, the 1928 congressional bill that authorised the building of the dam also overturned the Water Power Act of 1920 that had required electricity from federally built dams be sold to rural cooperatives and municipally owned utilities before any power that remained could be sold to private utility corporations. Hoover Dam provided a model for how electricity from federally constructed dams would nevertheless be controlled by privately owned, for-profit companies. Southern California received some 80 percent of the electricity generated by the Dam, half of which was sold by Southern California Edison (p. 119).

The final case study examines the rejection of a federal water resources planning proposal in 1950. The defeat of the proposal proves ‘The Triumph of Localism’, Elkind argues, and also ‘demonstrates that Americans now looked to business to control and contain government’ (p. 148). Perhaps so, but it is never entirely clear exactly who these ‘Americans’ were, nor whether they even represented a clear majority. In 1948 environmental writers like William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn published popular books warning that the growing power of business in American culture and politics posed a threat to the environment. Aldo Leopold concurred in his seminal A Sand County Almanac one year later. Clearly, not all Americans looked favourably on the growing power of business, and popular critiques interrogated its destructive environmental practices. Elkind’s keen analysis would be even richer with an exploration of this tension. How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy provides a valuable addition to business, policy, and environmental histories. It demonstrates that environmental policy decisions tended to be made not so much on the basis of what was best for the environment, but instead on which business elites possessed the most power to control the local political process. As such it enriches our understanding of important power dynamics in the formation of environmental policy, illuminating both the past and the present.

THOMAS JUNDT
American Studies, Brown University

Deborah Sutton’s Other Landscapes is a study of issues surrounding the colonisation of the Nilgiri hills of Madras Presidency British India in the nineteenth century. Impressively detailed in its use of archive materials, it draws on primary sources from the colonial bureaucracy scattered across several archives in India and the UK. A study of how power can transform a landscape, and of how the imperial discourse imagined and constructed certain landscapes as other, the reader is shown how colonisers ‘would reorder those elements of water, land, people, forest and production’ (p. 8) on aesthetic and utilitarian grounds in a bid to ‘improve’ the region as they saw fit. In the colonial Eden the British sought to create for themselves in the Nilgiri hills of southern India, ‘landscaping’ is invoked by Sutton not only as a process of improving the appearance of the countryside, but also as one of creating a new political ecology in which the British were the dominant players. As Edward Said once wrote, the ‘struggle over geography ... is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings’.¹

Each chapter of Other Landscapes systematically develops the theme of how the Nilgiri landscape was transformed and re-imagined in the nineteenth century. In Chapter Two, ‘Indigenous Precedent and Displacement’, Sutton provides a rigorous critical reading of the colonial archive to document, as she puts it, the establishment and enforcement of a ‘legal procedure for the alienation and displacement of indigenous communities’ of the Nilgiris (p. 42). Both coercion and compensation were used as tools of land appropriation, and though there is a fascinating history of indigenous communities mounting legalistic resistance to expropriation and encroachment of land by colonists, Sutton concludes: ‘In each of these disputes, the authorities recognized [indigenous] rights only for the purpose of their removal and transformation’ (p. 41). Chapter Three, ‘Land, Survey and Alienation’, focuses on the resistance of both hill communities and colonial settlers to the formation of contentious new boundaries of land ownership cemented through government cadastral surveys. Here Sutton makes the noteworthy if not particularly radical point that it was not only Todas, Badagas and Kotas and other indigenes who were engaged in disputes with Madras government authorities over land rights. Local European settlers also found land laws to be a source of occasional frustration; still the state, its courts and particularly the Madras Revenue Board, could almost always be counted on to weigh in their favour if conflict ever arose between them and any natives of the Nilgiris. Chapter Four, ‘The Agrarian Landscape’, continues developing the major theme of the book, focusing now on how ‘new cropping patterns, indebtedness, changes in the organization and tone of village administration’ (p. 79) changed the Nilgiri landscape. Whereas at the beginning of the nineteenth century Badaga cultivators were upheld by colonial administrators to be ‘“the most useful tribe on the hills”... by the end of the century, the Badagas were condemned as destructive parasites on the colonised landscape of the hills’ (p. 106). Chapter Five, ‘Changing the Nature of Forests’ shifts the locus but not the focus of the book once again. We learn that though there were few if any valuable hardwoods to be monopolised in the Nilgiris, shoals or ‘indigenous forests on the hills’ as Sutton calls them, were increasingly becoming segmented, hybridised and marginalised over the course of the nineteenth century. As the plantation economy started to dominate the hills, so too did the ‘belief that hill communities were fundamentally detrimental to the forests’ (p. 123). Chapter Six ‘Imperial Landscapes and Inalienable Land’ deals most specifically with munds, i.e. habitations or settlements of the Toda community. These were seen as the ‘proper “place”’ for the Todas, who were said to be ‘of the landscape’ (p. 162). Here Sutton elaborates on how both ‘popular ethnologies’ and ‘official restrictions’ turned the Toda into what the early twentieth-century ethnographer Athelstane Baines described as ‘a specimen of what might be called “stall fed aborigines”’ (p. 160). Finally Chapter Seven, ‘Authority, Spectacle and Ethnography’, although at first appearing not to deal directly with geography but rather with colonial anthropology, in fact makes an interesting argument about situating landscapes in time as well as space.² Certain areas were sequestered off to create landscapes where the primitivity could still be observed, museumised or carnivalised, as a spectacle of empire.

Much emphasis has been placed in recent years on the landscape reordering processes of empire, in India and around the world. While physical landscapes of the past have traditionally been the domain of archaeologists and geographers, the ways in which power and authority are expressed through landscapes is now a firmly established field for historians as well. Sutton’s Other Landscapes is one of a pair of works published within a year of one another, the other being Gunnel Cederlöf’s Landscapes and the Law: Environmental Politics, Regional Histories, and Contests over Nature (Permanent Black, 2008), to take up the question of how the Nilgiris were transformed into the most important British hill station in southern India in the nineteenth century. Sutton, who finished her PhD dissertation on the subject of the landscapes in the colonial Nilgiris in 2001 at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, had also coauthored an article with Cederlöf in 2006 on the issue of Toda land rights in the colonial Nilgiris.³ Sutton’s and Cederlöf’s book topics and conclusions are remarkably similar, but there are significant differences in methodology. Whereas Cederlöf’s historical scholarship delves deeply into theory at the interstices of anthropology, oral history, law, and environmental studies, Sutton’s work is firmly grounded in critical archival reading and remains rigorously empirical throughout. Sutton’s study takes a largely structural approach to a history of domination in the region, and does not dabble much in subaltern studies nor in studying what James Scott in 1985 dubbed as ‘the landscape of resistance’.⁴ Thus, perhaps the greatest originality of Sutton’s work is in how she avoids merely ‘mapping’ the theories of other disciplines, and even other historians, onto her case study.

EZRA RASHKOW
Montclair State University

1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 7.

2. This chapter largely resembles a previously published article by Sutton, ‘Horrid sights and customary rights: The Toda funeral on the colonial Nilgiris’, Indian Economic Social History Review 39 (2002): 45–70.

3. Gunnell Cederlöf and Deborah Sutton, ‘The Aboriginal Toda on Indigeneity, Exclusivism and Privileged Access to Land in the Nilgiri Hills, South India’ in Indigeneity in India, edited by Bengt G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba (London: Kegan Paul, 2006), pp. 159–186.

4. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 48–85.