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Title The East India Company and the natural world / edited by Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom, Alan Lester
Published Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

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Description 1 online resource
Series Palgrave studies in world environmental history
Palgrave studies in world environmental history.
Contents Preface / Anna Winterbottom -- Introduction : new imperial and environmental histories of the Indian Ocean / Alan Lester -- Botanical explorations and the East India Company : revisiting plant colonialism / Deepak Kumar -- Botanical and medical networks of Madras, 1680-1720 / Anna Winterbottom -- Robert Wright and his European collaborators / Henry Noltie -- The East India Company, famine and ecological conditions in eighteenth-century Bengal / Vinita Damodaran -- The climate of Bombay from 1799-1828 from four colonial weather diaries / George Adamson -- Mischievous rivers and evil shoals : the English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime / Rohan D'Souza -- The Rafflesia in the natural and imperial imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia / Timothy P. Barnard -- 'A proper set of views' : the British East India Company and the visualization of South-East Asia in the late eighteenth century / Geoff Quilley -- Malay-Indonesian materia medica and trans-cultural encounters / Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells -- ''Units ... 'of our mighty Indian empire' : New Zealand/Indian biological and landscape exchanges, 1830s-1890s" / James Beattie -- St Helena as a microcosm of the East India Company World / Dick Grove -- Afterword / Vinita Damodaran
Summary "The East India Company and the Natural World is the first work to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The EIC both contributed to and recorded environmental change during the first era of globalization. From the small island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, to peninsula India and outposts in South and Southeast Asia, the Company presence profoundly altered the environment by introducing plants and animals, felling forests, and redirecting rivers. The threats of famine and disease encouraged experiments with agriculture and the recording of the virtues of medicinal plants. The EIC records of the weather, the soils, and the flora provide modern climate scientists with invaluable data. The contributors - drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - use the lens of the Company to illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 272-284) and index
Notes Print version record
Subject East India Company -- History -- Sources
East India Company -- Archives
SUBJECT East India Company
East India Company. fast (OCoLC)fst00537796
Subject Imperialism -- Environmental aspects -- Sources
Environmentalism -- History -- Sources
Human ecology -- Colonies -- Great Britain -- Sources
Natural history -- Sources
History of science.
History.
Colonialism & imperialism.
Human geography.
The environment.
Physical geography & topography.
HISTORY -- Asia -- India & South Asia.
HISTORY -- Modern -- 17th Century.
HISTORY -- Modern -- 18th Century.
HISTORY -- Modern -- 19th Century.
SCIENCE -- Environmental Science.
NATURE -- Essays.
NATURE -- Reference.
TRAVEL -- Special Interest -- Ecotourism.
British colonies.
Commerce.
Environmentalism.
Natural history.
SUBJECT Great Britain -- Commerce -- History -- Sources
Great Britain -- Colonies -- History -- Sources
Subject Great Britain.
Genre/Form Archives.
History.
Sources.
Form Electronic book
Author Damodaran, Vinita, editor.
Winterbottom, Anna, 1979- editor.
Lester, Alan, editor
ISBN 9781137427274
1137427272
1322577048
9781322577043
1349491098
9781349491094