Synopses & Reviews
"This book offers something truly new and profound about the Black Atlantic: a glimpse of the presence of African foods, plants, and bodies of everyday knowledge that define Africa's subtle but persistent presence in the Atlantic World and beyond. Food, survival, and human ingenuity. Great stuff."and#151;James C. McCann, author of
Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Cropand#147;Today, many people are thinking differently, and more deeply, about food, slavery, and globalization. No one can connect these diverse topics more effectively than Judith Carney. Building on her pioneering study, Black Rice, Carney's absorbing new bookand#151;coauthored with Richard Nicholas Rosomoffand#151;is original, wide-ranging, and provocative. Like a bountiful African gourd vine, this remarkable overview spreads in many directions and bears impressive fruit.and#8221;and#151;Peter H. Wood, author of Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America
"In this highly original study, Judith Carney deliberately bypasses the huge (and hugely cruel) investment of slave labor power in the direct production of planter wealth. She offers in its place the less familiar chronicle of slave subsistence, and uncovers the essential role that African agricultural history had played in establishing and sustaining it. In the Shadow of Slavery goes back to Mother Africa, to shed new light on the Old World's part in the building of the New."and#151;Sidney W. Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power and Three Ancient Colonies (forthcoming)
"Judith Carney has written a brilliant green history of the Black Atlantic, illuminating in creative, path-blazing ways the globalization of the magnificent African commons."and#151;Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History
and#147;In the Shadow of Slavery unveils an epic saga of global foodways involving African peoples and their African-American descendants. The authors brilliantly craft the historical and geographic story of the stuggle to ensure the survival of their cultural-natural heritage, and the evolution of that heritage in the trans-Atlantic agrarian landscapes.and#8221;and#151;Karl S. Zimmerer, editor of Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation
"A fresh look at the African diaspora's far-reaching consequences by examining its effects on subsistence foods on both sides of the Atlantic. Carney provides a new understanding of the contributions that enslaved Africans made to American culture. An outstanding work."and#151;Gail E. Wagner, University of South Carolina
"Following on the heels of her magnificent book Black Rice, Judith Carney delves deeper into the invisible history of the Black Atlantic's foodways. She provides nothing less than a radical re-reading of the role of Africans in shaping not simply New World agrarian systems but the ways in which food was processed, how animals were reared, husbanded and tended, and how African knowledge and practice contributed to the global table. In the Shadow of Slavery is a remarkable narrative achievement, a rich account of endurance, innovation, survival, travel and historical memory nourished not so much on the estates and plantations as on the slave plots, and in the hearths and kitchens of those who survived the Middle Passage. A tour de force."and#151;Michael Watts, editor of Curse Of The Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta
and#147;In this brilliant book, Judith Carney charts the diaspora of African flora that resulted largely as an unintended consequence of the forced migration of Africans from the Old World to the New. European slave ships unwittingly carried Africa's botanical heritage along with the people who valued it to the Americas. Africans cultivated foods crucial to their very survival in what Carney beautifully styles 'botanical gardens of the dispossessed'. A must-read for anyone interested in the circulation of plants, peoples, and competing knowledges in the Atlantic World.and#8221;and#151;Londa Schiebinger, author of Plants and Empire: Colonial Biopropsecting in the Atlantic World
Review
and#8220;An important contribution to literature on the Columbian Exchange.and#8221;
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and#8220;Shadow of Slavery is thorough, cogent, creative in its use of scarce historical materials, and beautifully illustrated with color plates.and#8221;
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and#8220;A useful, entertaining, and exacting analysis of those theories and debates that have engaged economic historians for the last quarter-century.and#8221;
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and#8220;Groundbreaking. . . . This informative and enjoyable book offers not your regular meat and potatoes, but collard greens, cornbread, and gumbo.and#8221;
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and#8220;A collection of articles dealing with various environmental subjects covering different parts of the world. This book provides exactly this.and#8221;
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and#8220;[Gives] a truly integrative understanding of world history.and#8221;
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and#8220;This well-organized, clearly written volume finally eliminates any anxiety environmental historians have wrestled with for decades.and#8221;
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and#8220;Abuzz with obscure lore about a host of bugs that are as accommodating to humans as bedbugs, fleas, and mosquitoes are annoying.and#8221;
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and#8220;Accessible, easy prose ready-made for a broad, curious audience.and#8221;
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and#8220;Reading this book is like sitting at the feet of a favourite uncle on a winter evening beside a crackling fire.and#8221;
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and#8220;An easy-to-read book that is interesting and entertaining.and#8221;
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and#8220;Professional yet conversational, Waldbauerand#8217;s essays are an homage to a world that first fascinated him as a child.and#8221;
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and#8220;This book is a must read for students of world history.and#8221;
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and#8220;Enthusiastic.and#8221;
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and#8220;Engaging work. . . . Highly recommended.and#8221;
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and#8220;A significant contribution to the academic field, an encapsulation of information gleaned from different fields that will serve several audiences.and#8221;
Synopsis
This book traces the journeys of a stone across the world. From its remote point of origin in the city of Nishapur in eastern Iran, turquoise was traded through India, Central Asia, and the Near East, becoming an object of imperial exchange between the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Along this trail unfolds the story of turquoise--a phosphate of aluminum and copper formed in rocks below the surface of the earth--and its discovery and export as a global commodity.
In the material culture and imperial regalia of early modern Islamic tributary empires moving from the steppe to the sown, turquoise was a sacred stone and a potent symbol of power projected in vivid color displays. From the empires of Islamic Eurasia, the turquoise trade reached Europe, where the stone was collected as an exotic object from the East. The Eurasian trade lasted into the nineteenth century, when the oldest mines in Iran collapsed and lost Aztec mines in the Americas reopened, unearthing more accessible sources of the stone to rival the Persian blue.
Sky Blue Stone recounts the origins, trade, and circulation of a natural object in the context of the history of Islamic Eurasia and global encounters between empire and nature.
Synopsis
The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foodsand#151;millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the and#147;Asianand#8221; long bean, for exampleand#151;are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plotsand#151;and#147;botanical gardens of the dispossessedand#8221;and#151;became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.
Synopsis
Since around 1500 C.E., humans have shaped the global environment in ways that were previously unimaginable. Bringing together leading environmental historians and world historians, this book offers an overview of global environmental history throughout this remarkable 500-year period. In eleven essays, the contributors examine the connections between environmental change and other major topics of early modern and modern world history: population growth, commercialization, imperialism, industrialization, the fossil fuel revolution, and more. Rather than attributing environmental change largely to European science, technology, and capitalism, the essays illuminate a series of culturally distinctive, yet often parallel developments arising in many parts of the world, leading to intensified exploitation of land and water.
The wide range of regional studiesand#151;including some in Russia, China, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Southern Africa, and Western Europeand#151;together with the book's broader thematic essays makes The Environment and World History ideal for courses that seek to incorporate the environment and environmental change more fully into a truly integrative understanding of world history.
Synopsis
"This collection makes a valuable contribution to the literature. The essays have broad themes and impressive historical sweep. The Burke and Pomeranz volume will find a place on the bookshelf of every environmental historian who teaches the increasingly prevalent survey of world environmental history."and#151;James L.A. Webb, Jr., author of Humanity's Burden: A Global History of Malaria
Synopsis
It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reachand#151;and their numbersand#151;as never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history,
The Unending Frontier offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period.
John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. The Unending Frontier considers each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humansand#151;whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapesand#151;altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.
Synopsis
"
The Unending Frontier brings into focus the staggering environmental changes that came with the creation of the early modern world economy. John Richards assembles material from all around the world into a crisp and coherent picture of the meaning of global markets for the biosphere in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. This is a work of the first importance for environmental history, for economic history, and for world history."and#151;John R. McNeill, author of
Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World"A landmark book. Richards moves deftly among various ways of thinking about the early modern environmentand#151;national case studies, studies of particular industries, and reflections on increasing global interconnectionsand#151;so that we get not only a wealth of important data and stories, but multiple perspectives on the topic as a whole. Both the breadth and the depth of the project are inspiring: people will learn new things about environmental change, even in their regions of specialization. But the biggest payoff is in the way Richards weaves environmental change into more familiar early modern stories of global trade, colonialism, technological change, and, above all, state formation. None of these topics will ever look quite the same again."and#151;Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
Synopsis
The ink our ancestors wrote with, the beeswax in altar candles, the honey on our toast, the silk we wear. This enchanting book is a highly entertaining exploration of the myriad ways insects have enriched our livesand#150;culturally, economically, and aesthetically. Entomologist and writer Gilbert Waldbauer describes in loving, colorful detail how many of the valuable products insects have given us are made, how they were discovered, and how they have been used through time and across cultures. Along the way, he takes us on a captivating ramble through many far-flung corners of history, mythology, poetry, literature, medicine, ecology, forensics, and more. Enlivened with personal anecdotes from Waldbauer's distinguished career as an entomologist, the book also describes surprising everyday encounters we all experience that were made possible by insects. From butterfly gardens and fly-fishing to insects as jewelry and sex pheromones, this is an eye-opening ode to the wonder of insects that illuminates our extraordinary and essential relationship with the natural world.
Synopsis
"Gilbert Waldbauer takes us on a wild and storied ride through the insect world. Page after page,
Fireflies, Honey, and Silk is highly entertaining, authoritative, encyclopedic, mesmerizing."and#151;Erich Hoyt, author of
Insect Lives and
The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land of Ants"In Fireflies, Honey, and Silk, Waldbauer serves up a veritable smorgasbord of insects from around the world whose lives directly intersect our whims and desires. With wide-ranging essays, the author reveals species that not only please and inspire us, but also those we have used to nourish, adorn, and cure our bodies."and#151;Arthur V. Evans, author of National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America and What's Bugging You?
Synopsis
Illuminating one thousand years of history, The Pilgrim Art explores the remarkable cultural influence of Chinese porcelain around the globe. Cobalt ore was shipped from Persia to China in the fourteenth century, where it was used to decorate porcelain for Muslims in Southeast Asia, India, Persia, and Iraq. Spanish galleons delivered porcelain to Peru and Mexico while aristocrats in Europe ordered tableware from Canton. The book tells the fascinating story of how porcelain became a vehicle for the transmission and assimilation of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distancesand#151;from Japan and Java to Egypt and England. It not only illustrates how porcelain influenced local artistic traditions but also shows how it became deeply intertwined with religion, economics, politics, and social identity. Bringing together many strands of history in an engaging narrative studded with fascinating vignettes, this is a history of cross-cultural exchange focused on an exceptional commodity that illuminates the emergence of what is arguably the first genuinely global culture.
Synopsis
and#147;
The Pilgrim Art is a remarkable work of synthesis. With porcelain as his focus, Robert Finlay puts the histories of China, India, the Islamic world, Europe, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and East Africa into dialogue with one another. In highlighting the interactions, exchanges, and influences that linked these regions, he makes a distinctive contribution to understanding of the global past. He blends the histories of production, distribution, and consumption with the histories of technology, trade, and art, as well as social history, commodity history, cultural history, political history, and literary history. The result is a rich stew of historical analysis combining close attention to detail with graceful writing and a clear focus on global themes.
The Pilgrim Art ranks as an example of contemporary world history at its finest.and#8221; and#151;Jerry H. Bentley, Editor of the
Journal of World History and author of
Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times"Finlay traces the rise and fall of Chinese porcelain across global flows of desire, artistic symbols and styles, innovation, espionage, competition and colonial power. This is commodity history as it should be writtenand#151;exciting, engaging, with a masterful attention to regional context, be it France, Japan, India, or the Swahili Coast."and#151;Stewart Gordon, author of When Asia was the World
Synopsis
"Arash Khazeni offers a history that pushes beyond boundaries of time, space, and method. We move from geological time to the nineteenth century, from Iran to New Mexico, and from cultural to environmental history. This book represents a seminal contribution to the history of commodities and the best of the future of Middle East Studies."
Alan Mikhail, author of The Animal in Ottoman Egypt
"Khazeni manages that rare feat of combining the methodological finesse of a relatively new historical framework--world history--with an entirely new set of source materials, Persian and#145;jewel books,and#8217; which supply entry into the world of cultural meanings attached to turquoises. The scholarship is impeccable; it sets a new standard for thinking about the Middle East as part of a larger Eurasian world."
Nile Green, editor of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print
About the Author
Edmund Burke III is Professor, Presidental Chair, and Director of the Center for World History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and coeditor, with David N. Yaghoubian, of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (second editon, UC Press). Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Great Divergence, among other books.
Table of Contents
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Overview
1. Introduction: World History and Environmental History
Kenneth Pomeranz
2. The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment
Edmund Burke III
3. Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land
John F. Richards
Part Two: Rivers, Regions, and Developmentalism
4. The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E.-2 C.E.
Edmund Burke III
5. The Transformation of China's Environment, 1500-2
Kenneth Pomeranz
6. The Rhine as a World River
Mark Cioc
7. Continuity and Transformation: Colonial Rice Frontiers and Their Environmental Impact on the Great River Deltas of Mainland Southeast Asia
Michael Adas
Part Three: Landscapes, Conquests, Communities, and the Politics of Knowledge
8. Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective
William Beinart
9. Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Landscapes, and Ecologies
Mahesh Rangarajan
10. Latin American Environmental History: A Shifting Old/New Field
Lise Sedrez
11. The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History
Douglas R. Weiner
Select Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index