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Offers multiple points of entry into the dynamic and fast-growing field of Global Environmental History to specialists and newcomers alike
A Companion to Global Environmental History provides the cultural, intellectual, and political context for engagement with the environment in contemporary times. Presenting carefully selected essays by both pioneers in the field and younger scholars, this timely volume explores the many contours of the relationship between human societies and the natural world on which they depend.
Divided into four sections, the Companion opens by describing how the relationship between society and nature has evolved over time, followed by a series of regional and national histories that illustrate how the pieces of the global puzzle fit together. The third section examines various drivers of environmental transformations across place and time, such as technology, colonialism, industrial agriculture, and climate change. The final section surveys different types of environmental thought and action around the world, addressing the relationship between religion and the environment, environmental movements in China, the history of environmentalism in Brazil, and more.
The expanded second edition of the A Companion to Global Environmental History features six entirely new chapters on India, China, Africa, early modern cities, global environmental governance, and European environmentalism. The remainder of the book is extensively revised throughout, including up-to-date coverage of agriculture, industrialization, climate, and biological exchanges.
An invaluable road map to the field's past developments, current controversies, and future possibilities, A Companion to Global Environmental History:
- Covers a uniquely broad range of temporal, geographic, thematic, and contextual approaches
- Presents new evidence for longstanding debates and innovative applications of environmental history
- Offers fresh insights into environmental thought and culture, as well as environmental policy and politics around the world
- Brings together an international roster of environmental historians from nations including Brazil, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and China
- Contains comparative perspectives and approaches to the subject, sometimes with differing purposes and contrasting conclusions
A Companion to Global Environmental History, second edition, is an essential reference to current issues and controversies within the field. It is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in the subject, a handy guide for newcomers to the field, as well as an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, and environmental historians who want to expand or deepen their knowledge.
J.R. McNeill is Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs before becoming University Professor in 2006. His book Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World was listed by The Times as one of the best science books ever written. The book was co-winner of the World History Association and Forest History Society book prizes and runner-up for the BP Natural World book prize. McNeill has authored a number of other award-winning books on environmental history, and in 2010 he was awarded the Toynbee Prize for "academic and public contributions to humanity".
Erin Stewart Mauldin is currently a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University studying American Environmental History with an emphasis on the nineteenth-century South.
