Imperial Ecology

Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945

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by Peder Anker

Harvard University Press

Due/Published February 2002, 352 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674005953

Winner of The History of Science Society's Forum for History of Human Sciences Prize

From 1895 to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Peder Anker asks why ecology expanded so rapidly and how a handful of influential scientists and politicians established a tripartite ecology of nature, knowledge, and society. Patrons in the northern and southern extremes of the Empire, he argues, urgently needed tools for understanding environmental history as well as human relations to nature and society in order to set policies for the management of natural resources and to effect social control of natives and white settlement. Holists such as Jan Christian Smuts and mechanists such as Arthur George Tansley vied for the right to control and carry out ecological research throughout the British Empire and to lay a foundation of economic and social policy that extended from Spitsbergen to Cape Town. The enlargement of the field from botany to human ecology required a broader methodological base, and ecologists drew especially on psychology and economy. They incorporated those methodologies and created a new ecological order for environmental, economic, and social management of the Empire.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
From Social Psychology to Imperial Ecology
General Smuts's Politics of Holism and Patronage of Ecology
The Oxford School of Imperial Ecology
Holism and the Ecosystem Controversy
The Politics of Holism, Ecology, and Human Rights
Planning a New Human Ecology
Conclusion: A World without History
An Ecology of Ecologists
Notes
Sources
Index