HIST 6410 – Readings in Environmental History: The Environmental History of the Modern World
Fall 2013
Paul S. Sutter
Office: Hellems 212
Office Phone: 303-492-6208
Office Hours: Thursdays, 2-3 pm and by appointment (preferable)
Course Description
Over the last several decades, environmental history has emerged as one of the most important and vital subfields within the larger discipline of history. Environmental historians have not only insisted that environmental entities and forces have mattered to the course of human events, but also that we need to rethink our dominant historical narratives with environmental factors and consequences in mind. This semester we will be taking a wide-ranging and selective tour through the recent literature on the environmental history of the early modern and modern world. I have designed this course to fit the History Department’s new emphasis on training all of our students in global thematic fields as well as a major geographical field. As a result, I have chosen books and articles that cover a lot of space and time, and that introduce students to a broad range of topics and issues in recent environmental historiography. Because of the spatial and temporal breadth of the course, we all will be stretching ourselves significantly, myself included. I hope all of you will embrace our various forays into times, places, and themes that are outside of our usual scholarly interests and comfort zones.
Required Books
Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, editors, The Environment and World History
Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914
Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi
Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History
Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan
Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa
Marsha Weisiger, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country
John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (library ebook)
James McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop (library ebook)
Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes
Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracing the Biodiversity Ideal in India
Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism
Daniel Schneider, Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem
Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
All of these books will be available at the bookstore, though you will likely find better deals online for many of them. Two of the books, as indicated above, are available as ebooks through the library. All of the books(ebooks excepted) should be on reserve at Norlin as well, though only on two-hour loan. Most weeks we will also be reading one or two articles as well as the assigned books, and all of these should be available through the Library’s regular electronic journal holdings.
Scope of the Course and Required Work
I have designed this course to be a broad introduction to the field of environmental history. My major goal is to have each of you become knowledgeable about environmental historiography and the dominant themes, concepts, and debates within the field. The reading load is heavy, and you will be expected to carefully read all of the assigned readings for each week.
The most important single aspect of your work in the course is your attendance and participation. I expect students to attend all of the class meetings fully prepared to participate in class discussions in an active and thoughtful way. Students who miss classes, who are passive (or overly active) in discussions, or who otherwise fail to engage the material in constructive ways will suffer when it comes to the attendance and participation grade. Beyond maintaining a high level of participation across the semester, I will expect each student to serve as a discussion leader twice over the course of the semester. The role of discussion leaders is to: 1) initiate discussion by providing a brief introduction to the readings and a few critical questions that you would like the class to address; 2) to be a champion for the author(s) if discussion veers in too negative or critical a direction (or, alternately, to be a critic if the discussion is too effusive in its praise for an author); 3) to provide a brief summary of the discussion and its contours at the end of the class meeting. There will usually be two discussion leaders each week, and I strongly encourage discussion leaders to meet prior to class to do some preliminary discussion planning. Division of labor is fine as long as it is equal.
Aside from doing the reading, you will write weekly reaction essays of two pages in length maximum! The purpose of these essays is to promote discussion of the assigned readings, so you should focus on issues in the readings that you found provocative, problematic, admirable, orworth discussing for any other reason. These essays should not regurgitate the authors’ arguments; rather, you should personally engage the author(s) in a dialogue as a way of setting up discussion. These essays are a good place to try out arguments, to ask and work your way through answers to important questions raised by the readings, and/or to consider the historiographical, theoretical, and methodological issues raised by particular readings. These are short pieces, and I expect them to be efficient and polished. Please do not leave them until the last minute. These essays are due at the beginning of each class meeting; late reaction essays will not be accepted.
Over the course of the semester, you will also complete two book reviews of approximately 1000 words in length. You will complete these reviews during the same weeks when you are serving as discussion leader. These reviews should focus solely on the week’s assigned book. These reviewscan and should be critical, if appropriate, but your main tasks are to summarize the author’s arguments, to explain the scope of the work, and to place the book in a larger historiographical context (to the extent that you can). In other words, I want you to approach these reviews as if they were going to appear in a journal. On days when you have a book review due, you do not have to complete a reaction essay.
Finally, I am going to ask each of you to complete two substantial writing assignments. The first will be a Literature Review on an environmental history topic of your choosing, ideally one that speaks to your specific research interests. These reviews should be approximately 5000 words in length and should discuss five to ten additional works on a specific environmental history topic. I will provide more details on that assignment as the semester progresses, but you should start thinking about potential topics immediately. These essays will be due on the last day of class (December 12). The second substantial piece of writing will be what I am calling a Take Home Exam.The Take Home Exam is a summative and evaluative exercise, a kind of comprehensive exam within the course. The question you will have to answer is the following:
How does (or should) environmental history change our understandings of, and dominant historical narratives about, the modern world and its emergence?
These essays should be 5000 words in length, they should advance a clear thesis or theses in answer to the question, and they should do so by incorporating as many of the course readings as possible into the discussion. In other words, you should use this essay to show me how much you have learned over the course of the semester. While I expect each of you to be thinking about and building an answer to this question over the course of the entire semester, and while we may even work to refine the question itself as the semester progresses, I am also assuming that the final write-up will occur once the course has ended. The Take Home Exam will be due by 5 pm on December 19th.
Grading Breakdown
Weekly Reaction Essays20%
Book Reviews10%
Literature Review20%
Take Home Exam20%
Attendance and Participation30%
Course Schedule
August 29 – Introduction – Environmental History
-Burke and Pomeranz, Preface and Chapters 1-3
-Paul Sutter, “Reflections: What Can U.S. Environmental Historians Learn from Non-U.S. Environmental Historiography?” Environmental History 8, 1 (2003): 109-129.
-Crosby, Alfred. “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100, 4 (October 1995): 1177-89.
-Dan Smail, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review110, 5 (December 2005): 1337-1361.
September 5 – Oceans and Aquatic Environmental History
-Bolster, The Mortal Sea (entire)
-Richard C. Hoffmann, “Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 101, 3 (June 1996): 631-669.
-Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from Below the Waves,” American Historical Review 118, 2 (2013): 349-377.
September 12: Disease and Geopolitics in the Greater Caribbean
-McNeill, Mosquito Empires (entire)
-Timothy Mitchell, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” inRule of Experts(I will email a copy)
September 19: Engineering Nature in Early Modern Europe
-Mukerji, Impossible Engineering (entire)
-Karl Appuhn, “Inventing Nature: Forests, Forestry, and State Power in Renaissance Venice,” The Journal of Modern History72, 4 (December 2000): 851-89.
-Mark Cioc, “The Rhine as World River,” in Burke and Pomeranz, 165-190.
September 26:The Nature of the Ottoman Empire
-Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (entire)
-Mikhail, “Introduction,” Water and Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (available as ebook)
-Edmund Burke III, “The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E.-2000 C.E.,” in Burke and Pomeranz, 81-117.
October 3: Animals and Asian Environmental History
-Walker, Lost Wolves of Japan (entire)
-Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Transformation of China’s Environment, 1500-2000,” in Burke and Pomeranz, 118-164.
-Sam White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History” Environmental History 16, 1 (2011): 94-120.
-* Topic and Preliminary Bibliography for Literature Review is due
October 10: Conservation and Colonialism in Africa
-Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome (entire)
-William Beinart, “Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective,” in Pomeranz and Burke, 211-228.
October 17: The New Conservation Historiography in North America
-Weisiger, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country(entire)
-Karl Jacoby, “Class and Environmental History: Lessons from the ‘War in the Adirondacks’,” Environmental History 2, 3 (1997): 324-342.
October 24: Commodity Studies in Latin America
-Soluri, Banana Cultures (entire)
-Stuart McCook, “Global Rust Belt: HemileiaVastatrixand the Ecological Integration of World Coffee Production since 1850,”Journal of Global History 1,2 (2006): 177-195.
-Mark Carey, “Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Directions,” Environmental History 14, 2 (2009): 221-252.
October 31: Food and Power
-McCann, Maize and Grace (entire)
-Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, 2 (2007): 337-364.
-Edward Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930,” American Historical Review 117, 4 (2012): 1028-1060.
November 7: The New Environmental History of Disease and Public Health
-Mitman, Breathing Space (entire)
-Nancy Langston, “Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health,” Environmental History 13, 1 (2008): 41-65.
-Michael Specter, “Germs Are Us,” The New Yorker (October 22, 2012) – available online.
November 14: Science as Transnational Practice: The Case of India
-Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology (entire)
-Mahesh Rangarajan, “Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Landscapes, and Ecologies,” in Pomeranz and Burke, 229-254.
-RamachandraGuha and MadhavGadgil, “State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India,” Past and Present 123 (1989): 141-177.
November 21: Population Politics
-Robertson, The Malthusian Moment
-Matthew Connelly, “Seeing Beyond the State: The Population Control Movement and the Problem of Sovereignty,” Past and Present 193 (2006): 197-233.
November 28 – No Class – Thanksgiving Break
December 5: Urban Environmental History
-Schneider, Hybrid Nature
-Martin V. Melosi, “Humans, Cities, and Nature: How Do Cities Fit in the Material World?” Journal of Urban History 36, 1 (2010): 3-21.
December 12: Climate History
-Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
-DipeshChakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222.
-* Literature Review Due
December 19 – Take Home Exam due by 5 pm.
Students with Disabilities
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