Climate and colonialism

Recent years have seen a growth in scholarship on the intertwined histories of climate, science and European imperialism. Scholarship has focused both on how the material realities of climate shaped colonial enterprises, and on how ideas about climate informed imperial ideologies. Historians have shown how European expansion was justified by its protagonists with theories of racial superiority, which were often closely tied to ideas of climatic determinism. Meanwhile, the colonial spaces established by European powers offered novel ‘laboratories’ where ideas about acclimatisation and climatic improvement could be tested on the ground. While historical scholarship has focused on how powerful ideas of climate informed imperial projects, emerging scholarship in environmental history, history of science and historical geography focuses instead on the material and cognitive practices by which the climates of colonial spaces were made known and dealt with in fields such as forestry, agriculture and human health. These heretofore rather disparate areas of historical research carry great contemporary relevance of studies of how climates and their changes have been understood, debated and adapted to in the past

Regis Debray

regis debray The Times literary supplemen

La Dignite du Roi

Second empir

The sources of the decline in intellectual affiliation to the French Communist Party, 1978-1980

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D98186 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures : Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History

This book brings together original, state-of-the-art historical research from several continents and examines how mainly local peasant societies responded to colonial pressures to produce a range of different commodities. It shows how they were able to subvert these processes and establish viable alternative livelihoods. In particular, it introduces the fresh concept of the 'anti-commodity', to indicate local, sustainable forms of production steeped in values other than simply economic ones. The book will appeal to readers eager to find out more about the histories of some familiar items of everyday consumption such as rice, cotton, sugar and tobacco, as well as to those with a keen interest in the histories of African, Asian and Caribbean societies. Finally, it offers new directions in both historical and contemporary research on the continents beyond Europe

Anti-commodities revisited: Food, culture, and resistance

This chapter examines the use and relevance of the concept of anti-commodity originally devised to highlight how local cultures of crop cultivation in societies under colonial rule functioned as forms of resistance to the attempted imposition of regimes of commercial agriculture. It argues that the concept remains particularly fruitful in the context of local small-farmer strategies and cultural choices around food crop cultivation and consumption. Anti-commodity defines and reveals alternative farmer value systems and cultivating practices to ongoing profit-oriented processes of commodification of food systems. The chapter outlines two research-based case studies, concretely illustrating diverse modes of counter-hegemonic food culture. One study is set in the colonial past, the other in the post-colonial present, suggesting that anti-commodity practices remain an important story to be told and heard not only about peasant pasts but also about farmer counter-movements in the contemporary world

Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History

This book brings together original, state-of-the-art historical research from several continents and examines how mainly local peasant societies responded to colonial pressures to produce a range of different commodities. It shows how they were able to subvert these processes and establish viable alternative livelihoods. In particular, it introduces the fresh concept of the 'anti-commodity', to indicate local, sustainable forms of production steeped in values other than simply economic ones. The book will appeal to readers eager to find out more about the histories of some familiar items of everyday consumption such as rice, cotton, sugar and tobacco, as well as to those with a keen interest in the histories of African, Asian and Caribbean societies. Finally, it offers new directions in both historical and contemporary research on the continents beyond Europe