The East India Company and the Natural W

Marc Notes: This volume explores the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The contributors - drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857. Table of Contents: Preface; Anna WinterbottomIntroduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean; Alan Lester1. Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting Plant Colonialism; Deepak Kumar2. Botanical and Medical Networks of Madras, 1680-1720; Anna Winterbottom3. Robert Wright and his European Collaborators; Henry Noltie4. The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth Century Bengal; Vinita Damodaran 5. The Climate of Bombay from 1799-1828 from Four Colonial Weather Diaries; George Adamson6. Mischievous Rivers and Evil Shoals: The English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime; Rohan D'Souza7. The Rafflesia in the Natural and Imperial Imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia; Timothy P. Barnard8. 'A proper set of views': The British East India Company and the Visualization of South-East Asia in the Late Eighteenth Century; Geoff Quilley9. Malay-Indonesian Materia Medica and Trans-Cultural Encounters; Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells10. ''Units...of our mighty Indian Empire': New Zealand/Indian Biological and Landscape Exchanges, 1830s-1890s'; James Beattie 11. St Helena as a Microcosm of the East India Company World; Dick GroveAfterword; Vinita DamodaranSelect BibliographyBiographical Note: Vinita Damodaran is Director of the Centre for World Environmental History and Senior lecturer in the department of History at the University of Sussex, UK. Her expertise is on the indigenous communities and the environmental history of Eastern India. She has published numerous books and articles including co-editing Nature and the Orient; the Environmental history of South and South East Asia (1998) and The British Empire and the Natural World, Environmental encounters in South Asia (2011) Anna Winterbottom is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK, where she is working on a project on the history of medicine and healing in the Indian Ocean world. She previously worked at McGill University, where she remains an associate of the Indian Ocean World Centre. She has published several articles and book chapters on the East India Company and the history of science and medicine. Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (2001); co-editor of Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (2006) and co-author of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014).

Contributor Bio:  Lester, Alan Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. His first book was From Colonization to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa. It was reviewed as 'without doubt the best historical geography of South Africa to date'. Although his work over the next five years remained centred on southern Africa, it focused on the range of connections between the Cape colonial frontier and other sites of British colonization. With Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain, he helped to pioneer the spatial turn in colonial studies. Catherine Hall wrote that the book 'provides a model which others would do well to follow' and John Darwin concluded that it 'opens up a very promising avenue towards a reinvigorated imperial historiography'. Excerpts are included in the New Imperial Histories Reader, Stephen Howe crediting Lester with being 'the pioneer' of 'a key concept much used in recent 'new imperial history' writing that of the imperial network'. Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, co-edited with David Lambert, showed how personal trajectories combined with movements of material, capital, commodities and ideas continually to reconfigure colonial and metropolitan places. Antoinette Burton described the book as developing 'fresh insight and a lot of intellectual energy as well', and it has been further reviewed as 'demonstrat[ing] what biography at its best can do'.