GLOBAL SWEEP Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. By RICHARD H. GROVE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 540. £45 (ISBN 0-521-40385-5).

Abstract

Finding that very little of Richard Grove's history of European environmental thought deals with continental Africa, historians of Africa may decide against immersing themselves in its complex global sweep and intricate detail. They can absorb Grove's crucial lessons, however, by turning to his final one hundred pages, where he surveys colonial environmental thought and policy in India during the first half of the nineteenth century, and presents his conclusions about environmentalism and empire. In these pages, Grove draws together the numerous threads of his earlier chapters, which discuss European thinking about environmental change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the islands of St Helena, Mauritius and the Caribbean. Having followed his discussion of island environmentalism by tracing the evolution of British environmental thought in India during the period of East India Company rule, Grove concludes by arguing that ‘modern environmentalism ... emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and ecological conditions of colonial rule’ (p. 486).