No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Scaling Up
Joachim Radkau and the Project of Global Environmental History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
To introduce this special issue of Social Science History, my essay sketches the historiographical context out of which grew Joachim Radkau's (2008) book Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (German edition 2002 [2000]). It notes a few of the problems that Radkau and other historians face when undertaking a solo synthesis of research mainly at the local and regional levels. In addition to the issues of selecting themes, geographic extent, and temporal depth, questions of purpose have to be considered. Should global environmental history devote itself to producing a usable past for policies of the present and future? Should it, rather, take a prospective approach to reconstruct environmental thinking and practice as it was in a previous time, the better to identify unintended consequences and ambiguities in the historical past and to avoid presentism and anachronism while recognizing that history offers teachable moments? Radkau hews more to the second of these approaches than to the first, and his book provides the focus and a point of departure for the rest of the essays in the issue.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Social Science History , Volume 37 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Global Environmental History , Fall 2013 , pp. 311 - 324
- Copyright
- Copyright © Social Science History Association 2013
References
Blackbourn, David (2006) The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund, and Pomeranz, Kenneth, eds. (2009) The Environment and World History. California World History Library. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Brett (2009) “Ecologically unequal exchange in comparative perspective: A brief introduction.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (3–4): 211–14.Google Scholar
Clark, Brett, and Foster, John Bellamy (2009) “Ecological imperialism and the global metabolic rift: Unequal exchange and the guano/nitrates trade.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (3–4): 311–34.Google Scholar
Corona, Gabriella, ed. (2008) “What is global environmental history? Conversation with Piero Bevilacqua, Guillermo Castro, Ranjan Chakrabarti, Kobus Du Pisani, John R. McNeill, Donald Worster.” Global Environment 2 (4): 1–22.Google Scholar
Cronon, William (1991) Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Crosby, Alfred W. (1972) The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Crumley, Carole L. (1994) Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Cunfer, Geoff, and Krausmann, Fridolin (2009) “Sustaining soil fertility: Agricultural practice in the Old and New Worlds.” Global Environment 2 (4): 8–43.Google Scholar
Decker, Ethan H., Elliott, Scott, Smith, Felisa A., Blake, Donald R., and Rowland, F. Sherwood (2000) “Energy and material flow through the urban ecosystem.” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 25 (1): 685–740.Google Scholar
Diamond, Jared M. (1999) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Diamond, Jared M. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Glacken, Clarence J. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hornborg, Alf, McNeill, J. R., and Martinez-Alier, Joan, eds. (2007) Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change. Lanham, MD: AltaMira.Google Scholar
Hughes, J. Donald (2009) An Environmental History of the World: Humankind's Changing Role in the Community of Life. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mann, Charles C. (2011) 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Mannion, Antoinette M. (1991) Global Environmental Change: A Natural and Cultural Environmental History. Harlow: Longman and Wiley.Google Scholar
McNeill, J. R. (2000) Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Merchant, Carolyn (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W. (2003) “The modern world-system as environmental history? Ecology and the rise of capitalism.” Theory and Society 32 (3): 307–77.Google Scholar
Mosley, Stephen (2010) The Environment in World History. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis.Google Scholar
Pyne, Stephen J. (1997) World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Radkau, Joachim (2002 [2000]) Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt. Munich: Beck.Google Scholar
Radkau, Joachim (2008) Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Dunlap, Thomas. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Richards, John F. (2003) The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ritvo, Harriet (2009) The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ross, Lillian (2001 [1950]) “How do you like it now, gentleman?,” in Remnick, David (ed.) Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorker. New York: Random House: 223–44.Google Scholar
Schandl, Heinz, and Schulz, Niels (2002) “Changes in the United Kingdom's natural relations in terms of society's metabolism and land-use from 1850 to the present day.” Ecological Economics 41 (2): 203–21.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Robert M. (2010) “Rail transport, agrarian crisis, and the restructuring of agriculture: France and Great Britain confront globalization, 1860–1900.” Social Science History 34 (2): 229–55.Google Scholar
Simmons, I. G. (1996) Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment, History. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Simmons, I. G. (2001) An Environmental History of Great Britain: From Ten Thousand Years Ago to the Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Simmons, I. G. (2008) Global Environmental History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sörlin, Sverker, and Warde, Paul (2007) “The problem of the problem of environmental history: A re-reading of the field.” Environmental History 12 (1): 107–30.Google Scholar
Stephens, Robert O. (1973) “Hemingway and Stendhal: The Matrix of a Farewell to Arms.” PMLA 88 (2): 271–80.Google Scholar
Thomas, Keith (1983) Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Wallerstein, Immanuel M. (1974) Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Whited, Tamara L. (2000) Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Whited, Tamara L. (2005) Northern Europe: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.Google Scholar
Winter, James H. (1999) Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William (1837) “The Excursion, 1814,” in Reed, Henry (ed.) The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works. Philadelphia: Kay: 408.Google Scholar
Worster, Donald (1977) Nature's Economy: The Roots of Ecology. San Francisco: Sierra Club.Google Scholar
Worster, Donald (1985) Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar