John F. Richards is Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of The Mughal Empire (1993) and Mughal Administration in Golconda (1975) and the editor of Land, Property and the Environment (2001). He is coeditor of World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (1988) and Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (1983).

• List of Maps List of Tables Preface Introduction Part I. The Global Context 1. The Early Modern World 2. Climate and Early Modern World Environmental History Part II. Eurasia and Africa 3. Pioneer Settlement on Taiwan 4. Internal Frontiers and Intensified Land Use in China 5. Ecological Strategies in Tokugawa Japan 6. Landscape Change and Energy Transformation in the British Isles 7. Frontier Settlement in Russia 8. Wildlife and Livestock in South Africa Part III. The Americas 9. The Columbian Exchange: The West Indies 10. Ranching, Mining, and Settlement Frontiers in Colonial Mexico 11. Sugar and Cattle in Portuguese Brazil 12. Landscapes of Sugar in the Antilles Part IV. The World Hunt 13. Furs and Deerskins in Eastern North America 14. The Hunt for Furs in Siberia 15. Cod and the New World Fisheries 16. Whales and Walruses in the Northern Oceans Conclusion Bibliography Index

“Richards steers a calm course between these extremes [of the catastrophic and the celebratory view of environmental history], but it is as clear from his choice of examples as from his language that he inclines more to the celebratory than the apocalyptic view. . . . Richards advances beyond a purely Eurocentric approach to the dynamics of change and presents the frontier as an evolving, interactive process influenced by both human and non-human factors. That is no mean achievement.”