7 - Europe’s Place in Global Environmental History

Summary

This chapter concerns environmental relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. Europe and Europeans, and Europe’s flora and fauna, altered environments on other continents. The content of other continents’ biotas, and their soils, seas, and mineral veins, affected Europe too. These sorts of connections, involving animals, plants, microbes, minerals – and many other components of the natural world – had occasionally powerful impacts on European and indeed world history. They began many millennia ago. This chapter begins with an overview of Europe’s distinctive environmental features. It then turns to four broad and overlapping categories, all considered only as regards European connections to other world regions: Europe’s history of biological exchanges, beginning with the arrival from Southwest Asia of the Neolithic complex of domesticated plants and animals; its imperial environmental history, which began in the fifteenth century; its industrial environmental history, which began in late eighteenth century; and the intellectual environmental history of Europe’s interactions with the wider world, mainly between 1700 and 1950.