The first thing that must be noted is that this is not a 2014 title, despite the publication date, but a reprinting of a selection of chapters from Richards' 2003 opus, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. In 2003 the scope and imagination that marked Richards’ book was path-breaking but in 2014 the ground has been much better explored, and it is odd that the Press decided to release this small book.
Nonetheless, the patterns that Richards documents continue to be all too relevant. 2014 will be remembered as the year the world finally realized the scale of elephant and rhinoceros poaching, and the 2014 TRAFFIC report on this topic makes grim reading. International trade of ivory and rhino horn has reached unheard of levels but this pattern is not new. Ivory was trafficked from Africa to Asia long before the Europeans arrived on the scene, and elephants were transported from Africa across the Mediterranean during Roman times. Nevertheless, ‘commodification’ is an important way to think about what is happening to these species.
In the book Richards makes his case for global commodification of animals by focusing on furs, deerskins, cod, whales and walruses. In four chapters that span the trade in North America and Siberia (deer skins and furs) and the North Atlantic (cod, whales and walruses) he summarizes troves of data on numbers, extent and trends. He shows how markets responded to increasing and then dwindling numbers of animals. The total numbers are mind-boggling. It is not clear why these cases were chosen (perhaps because of the availability of a robust secondary literature) but many readers will already be familiar with the general outlines of the story he tells.
For all the numbers, there is little synthesis and the reader is left unsatisfied by the surfeit of little-digested data. The original book from which these are excerpted had a central thesis and greater analysis but when removed from this context these chapters feel naked. Despite brief attempts to understand the impacts of the trade on the species populations, or knock-on impacts on ecosystems, these issues are not of central importance to the author. The biology bits of the book are often dated or drawn from an odd assortment of references. If you need reminding, again, of the major impacts global trade can have, and has had, on animals you may enjoy this book. At 154 pages it won't take you long. Then you should return to the real work of stopping the trade in ivory, rhino horn and pangolins.
