Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900

"By focusing on the human gaze, or how people interpret their relationship with land, Sumit Guha traces the longue durâee of the political ecology of empire in South Asia during the age of empires. This relationship is in most sharp relief when comparing the exploitative and extractive practices of the Mughal Empire and the industrial British Raj as these imperial regimes encountered a large and old agrarian society. While scholars of South Asia regularly dwell on the destructive nature of British policies in South Asia, Guha integrates the cultural turn in environmental studies with the complex imperial rivalries that defined South Asia from the fifteenth through the mid-twentieth century to demonstrate how land use is defined through matrices of competing geographic expertise, too often in service of distant courts and environmental degradation"--

Sumit Guha is professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Brill, 2013), Health and Population in South Asia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Permanent Black, 2001), Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200-1991 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, 1818-1941 (Oxford University Press, 1985); and editor of Growth, Stagnation, or Decline? Agricultural Productivity in British India (Oxford University Press, 1992).