Rethinking Environmental History World-System History and Global Environmental Change

by Hornborg, Alf; McNeill, J. R.; Martinez-Alier, Joan; Bunker, Stephen G.; Fisher, William H.; Gassón, Rafael A.; Giljum, Stefan; Håkansson, N Thomas; Heyman, Josiah; Hughes, J Donald; Jorgenson, Andrew K.; Marks, Robert B.; -Alier, Joan Martinez; Moore, Ja

• ISBN13: 9780759110281
• ISBN10: 075911028X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-01-18
• Publisher: AltaMira Press

Summary

This exciting new reader in environmental history provides a framework for understanding the relations between ecosystems and world systems over time. Alf Hornborg has brought together a group of the foremost writers from the social, historical and geographical sciences to provide an overview of the ecological dimension of global, economic processes, with a long-term, historical perspective. Readers are challenged to integrate studies of the Earth system with studies of the World system, and to reconceptualize human-environmental relations and the challenges of global sustainability. Immanuel Wallerstein, renowned Yale sociologist and originator of the world-system concept, closes the volume with his reflections on the intellectual, moral, and political implications of global environmental change.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Environmental History as Political Ecology	p. 1
The Environment in World-System History: Tracing Social Processes in Nature
Environmental Impacts of the Roman Economy and Social Structure: Augustus to Diocletian	p. 27
"People Said Extinction Was Not Possible": Two Thousand Years of Environmental Change in South China	p. 41
Precolonial Landesque Capital: A Global Perspective	p. 61
Food, War, and Crisis: The Seventeenth-Century Swedish Empire	p. 79
The Role of Deforestation in Earth and World-System Integration	p. 101
Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640	p. 123
Trade, "Trinkets," and Environmental Change at the Edge of World-Systems: Political Ecology and the East African Ivory Trade	p. 143
Steps to an Environmental History of the Western Llanos of Venezuela: A World-System Perspective	p. 163
The Extractive Economy: An Early Phase of the Globalization of Diet, and Its Environmental Consequences	p. 179
Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1640-1830	p. 199
Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Unraveling Environmental Injustice in the Modern World
Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade	p. 221
Natural Values and the Physical Inevitability of Uneven Development under Capitalism	p. 239
Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement	p. 259
Uneven Ecological Exchange and Consumption-Based Environmental Impacts: A Cross-National Investigation	p. 273
Combining Social Metabolism and Input-Output Analyses to Account for Ecologically Unequal Trade	p. 289
Physical Trade Flows of Pollution-Intensive Products: Historical Trends in Europe and the World	p. 307
Environmental Issues at the U.S.-Mexico Border and the Unequal Territorialization of Value	p. 327
Surrogate Money, Technology, and the Expansion of Savanna Soybeans in Brazil	p. 345
Scale and Dependency in World-Systems: Local Societies in Convergent Evolution	p. 361
The Ecology and the Economy: What Is Rational?	p. 379
Index	p. 391
About the Contributors	p. 407
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