The East India Company and the Natural World

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean

   • Alan Lester

   Pages 1-15

3. Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting ‘Plant Colonialism’

   • Deepak Kumar

   Pages 16-34

4. Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680–1720

   • Anna Winterbottom

   Pages 35-57

5. Robert Wight and his European Botanical Collaborators

   • H. J. Noltie

   Pages 58-79

6. The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

   • Vinita Damodaran

   Pages 80-101

7. Colonial Private Diaries and their Potential for Reconstructing Historical Climate in Bombay, 1799–1828

   • George Adamson

   Pages 102-127

8. Mischievous Rivers and Evil Shoals: The English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime

   • Rohan D’Souza

   Pages 128-146

9. The Rafflesia in the Natural and Imperial Imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia

   • Timothy P. Barnard

   Pages 147-166

10. ‘A proper set of views’: The British East India Company and the Eighteenth-Century Visualization of South-East Asia

    • Geoff Quilley

    Pages 167-192

11. Unlikely Partners: Malay-Indonesian Medicine and European Plant Science

    • Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells

    Pages 193-218

12. Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: Indian-New Zealand Biological and Landscape Connections, 1830s–1890s

    • James Beattie

    Pages 219-248

13. St Helena as a Microcosm of the East India Company World

    • A. T. Grove

    Pages 249-269

14. Afterword

    • Vinita Damodaran

    Pages 270-271

15. Back Matter

    Pages 272-297

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This book is the first to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The contributors – drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857.

• Environment
• History
• Empire
• East India Company
• bibliography
• capital
• climate
• colonialism
• environment
• India
• Indonesia
• networks
• Environmental Geography

“These essays present useful, interesting, and informative data gleaned from what is evidently exemplary research. … As valuable contributions to the continuum of interdisciplinary history, they deserve long-term appreciation.” (Arthur Macgregor, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 44 (1), April, 2017)

“These essays are uniformly strong, and this book is a timely and valuable collection. It is one more indication of the multidisciplinary possibilities entailed by environmental history. … This compendium provides us with a more nuanced view of empire, one that greatly expands our understanding of imperial histories.” (Christopher V. Hill, Environmental History, Vol. 21, April, 2016)

“This is a well-rounded and important collection that brings together scholars active in different sub-disciplines. … The East India Company and the Natural world is an important volume, useful for specialists and for the classroom… .” (Jayeeta Sharma, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 51 (1), January, 2016)

• Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex, UK

  Vinita Damodaran

• Department of History, University of Sussex, UK

  Anna Winterbottom

• University of Sussex, UK

  Alan Lester

George Adamson, King's College London, UK Timothy P. Barnard, National University of Singapore James Beattie, University of Waikato, New Zealand A.T. Grove, independent scholar, UK Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, National University of Singapore Deepak Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Henry Noltie, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, UK Rohan d'Souza, Shiv Nadar University, UK Geoff Quilley, University of Sussex, UK.

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