Rethinking Environmental History

Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and professor of human ecology at Lund University. J. R. McNeill is professor of history, director of graduate studies, and Cinco Hermanos Chair of Environmental and International Affairs at Georgetown University. Joan Martinez-Alier is professor of ecological economics in the Department of Economics and Economic History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

• Introduction: Environmental History as Political EcologyPart I The Environment in World-System History: Tracing Social Processes in Nature1. Environmental Impacts of the Roman Economy and Social Structure: Augustus to Diocletian2. "People Said Extinction Was Not Possible": Two Thousand Years of Environmental Change in South China3. Precolonial Landesque Capital: A Global Perspective4. Food, War, and Crisis: The Seventeenth-Century Swedish Empire5. The Role of Deforestation in Earth and World-System Integration6. Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-16407. Trade, "Trinkets," and Environmental Change at the Edge of World-Systems: Political Ecology and the East African Ivory Trade8. Steps to an Environmental History of the Western Llanos of Venezuela: A World-System Perspective9. The Extractive Economy: An Early Phase of the Globalization of Diet, and Its Environmental Consequences10.Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1640-1830Part II Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Unraveling Environmental Injustice in the Modern World11. Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade12. Natural Values and the Physical Inevitability of Uneven Development under Capitalism13. Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement14. Uneven Ecological Exchange and Consumption-Based Environmental Impacts: A Cross-National Investigation15. Combining Social Metabolism and Input-Output Analyses to Account for Ecologically Unequal Trade16. Physical Trade Flows of Pollution-Intensive Products: Historical Trends in Europe and the World17. Environmental Issues at the U.S.-Mexico Border and the Unequal Territorialization of Value18. Surrogate Money, Technology, and the Expansion of Savanna Soybeans in Brazil19. Scale and Dependency in World-Systems: Local Societies in Convergent Evolution20. The Ecology and the Economy: What is Rational?

The contributors to Rethinking Environmental History argue for a truly global, historical, and transdisciplinary approach to environmental history, even when analyzing the most localized instances of degradation. They show how and why environmental degradations have been uneven throughout history—and in the process employ, critique, and extend world-systems analysis.