"Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900" Book Talk by Sumit Guha, Univ of Texas at Austin

Book Talk: "Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900" by Sumit Guha, University of Texas at Austin (History Faculty New Book Series)
Date: Monday October 7, 2024
Location: GAR 4.100 & Zoom Livestream
The History Faculty New Book Series presents
Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900
(University of Washington Press, 2023)
The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands and peoples to their agendas across Asia. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900 compares the practices of the Mughal and British Empires to demonstrate how their fluctuating capacity for domination was imbricated in the formation of environmental knowledge itself.
The establishment of imperial control transforms local knowledge of the world into the aggregated information that reproduces centralized power over it. That is the political ecology that reshapes entire biomes. Animals and plants are translocated; human communities are displaced or destroyed. Some species proliferate; others disappear. But these state projects are overlaid upon the many local and regional geographies made by sacred cosmologies and local sites, pilgrimage routes and river fords, hot springs and fluctuating aquifers, hunting ranges and nesting grounds, notable trees and striking rocks.
Guha uncovers these ecological histories by scrutinizing little-used archival sources. His historically based political ecology demonstrates how the biomes of a vast subcontinent were changed by struggles to make and to resist empire.
"Brilliantly researched, analytically rich, and field-shifting. Guha introduces us to an entirely new method of doing environmental history."
Debjani Bhattacharyya, author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta
"A major work of original scholarship that provides an eye-opening perspective on the history of South Asia over the past five hundred years, putting ecology and environmental change at the heart of the story."
Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History
"Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900 redefines the study of political ecology in South Asia. Drawing on a diverse archive and bringing together insights from different fields, it creatively traces how the political fortunes of ruling elites in the region over the past five hundred years were shaped by and intersected with different kinds of ecological agents, human and nonhuman. This brilliant and ambitious book is a stunning testament to the methodological and theoretical power of longue durée environmental history that is simultaneously vast and minute in scope."
Radhika Govindrajan, author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas
Dr. Sumit Guha holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History at The University of Texas at Austin. His many books include History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000. Read more about his work and publications on his faculty profile page at: liberalarts.ut....
Respondent:
Ruth Mostern
Professor of History and World History Center Director
University of Pittsburgh
Ruth Mostern is Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh and Vice President of the World History Association. She is the author of two single-authored books: Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State, 960-1276 CE (Harvard Asia Center, 2011), and The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2022. She is also co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016), and of a special issue of Open Rivers Journal (2017). She is the author or co-author of over thirty articles published in books and peer reviewed journals. Ruth is Principal Investigator and Project Director of the World Historical Gazetteer, a prize-winning digital infrastructure platform for integrating databases of historical place name information.
About the book:
uwapress.uw.ed...
Event details:
bit.ly/3sktqzL
Sponsored by: Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History; and South Asia Institute