Description
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.
Table of Contents
Preface; Anna Winterbottom Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean; Alan Lester 1. Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting Plant Colonialism; Deepak Kumar 2. Botanical and Medical Networks of Madras, 1680-1720; Anna Winterbottom 3. Robert Wright and his European Collaborators; Henry Noltie 4. The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth Century Bengal; Vinita Damodaran 5. The Climate of Bombay from 1799-1828 from Four Colonial Weather Diaries; George Adamson 6. Mischievous Rivers and Evil Shoals: The English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime; Rohan D'Souza 7. The Rafflesia in the Natural and Imperial Imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia; Timothy P. Barnard 8. 'A proper set of views': The British East India Company and the Visualization of South-East Asia in the Late Eighteenth Century; Geoff Quilley 9. Malay-Indonesian Materia Medica and Trans-Cultural Encounters; Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells 10. ''Units…of our mighty Indian Empire': New Zealand/Indian Biological and Landscape Exchanges, 1830s-1890s'; James Beattie 11. St Helena as a Microcosm of the East India Company World; Dick Grove Afterword; Vinita Damodaran Select Bibliography
