Ecological Imaginaries and the Making of Trans-regional Landscapes

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Environmental historians often prefer to focus on ecological systems rather than human-made borders and have produced abundant studies examining the global circulations of people, plants, pathogens, and animals. Scholars have rightly noted that in addition to new markets and trade patterns, such circulations also produce new modes of capitalist extraction that increasingly bring together diverse—and sometimes clashing—notions of environmental management, community organization, and ecological imaginaries.
Engaging with the conference themes of extraction and speculation, this Early Career Caucus-sponsored panel seeks to examine transnational histories of extraction through an economic lens and as processes of projecting broader political, cultural, and ecological perceptions onto landscapes and communities. Maximizing economic value, we argue, is never the sole motivation behind extracting natural resources; the latter also involves regimenting ecological systems and reorganizing social structures in tandem. The papers on the panel trace unexpected transnational networks of exchange and diplomacy that were intensified by newly available technologies and global political reorganization at the turn of the twentieth century. The panel considers case studies from around the globe, including the travels of date-palm monoculture between the Middle East and the U.S. Southwest, a diplomatic dispute at the Venezuela-British Guiana border, transnational colonization schemes in the forests of northern Mexico, and colonial environmental knowledge transfer and empire making in the mountains of South Asia. Thinking comparatively and expansively about these case studies, the panel proposes “ecological imaginaries” as an essential framework for deepening our understanding of the relationships between extraction, capital, empire, and landscapes.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• “Disputed El Dorado”: The Venezuelan Imbroglio and the Nature of the New Monroe Doctrine, 1890-1904 - Mark Lewis Reynolds, University of California Riverside

• Environmental Knowledge Transfer from the Mountains of South Asia: Changes in the Landscape and Making of the Empire - Donal Thomas Thomas, State University of New York - Stony Brook / Stony Brook University

• Empire, Ecological Imaginaries, and the Environmental Transformation of Northern Mexico’s Forests - Sarah Sears, University of California, Berkeley

• MonoCulture with a Capital C: Date Palms and the Roots of Modern Monoculture - Atar David, the University of Texas at Austin

Chair

• Jonathan Robins, Michigan Technological University