Explorations in History and Globalization

Cátia Antunes, Karwan Fatah-Black, Cátia Antunes, Karwan Fatah-Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317243830
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Considering the ways in which the 'global turn' is changing the theory and practice of historical disciplines, Explorations in History and Globalization engages with the concept and methodology of globalization, challenging traditional divisions of space and time to offer a range of perspectives on how globalization has affected social, economic, political and cultural history.

Each chapter covers a specific theme, discussing how globalization has shaped these themes and how they have contributed to globalization throughout history. Including topics such as ecological exchanges, trade, exchanges of knowledge, migration, empire and urbanization, this volume both explains historical trajectories through a global analytical framework and provides tools that students can employ when posing their own research questions about historical globalization.

Containing suggestions for further reading and guidance on the ways in which primary source material can be used as a basis for global historical studies, this is the ideal volume for all students interested in the global exchanges between people throughout history.

PART 1

Exchanges and movements

1

ECOLOGICAL EXCHANGES AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Chris Gratien

Globalization involves both real and imagined defiance of geography. As a process, it is defined against an implicit understanding of the ways in which geography and space serve as natural boundaries to human interaction. Thus, a globalized space is one in which those would-be boundaries are not only crossed physically, but also overcome conceptually through an imagining of proximity against a reality of spatial distance. However, globalization in practice does not mean a flat and even world; quite the contrary, as authors such as Harm de Blij have illustrated, geography plays a critical role in shaping the form and outcome of global interactions.¹ Since globalization is on some level a challenge to the physical world, the study of that world is critical to a proper understanding of globalization and its effects and consequences. This chapter offers an overview of how geography and environment can be written into the history of globalization.

Although many disciplines, including physics, geology and biology, take diachronic aspects of the natural world as a topic of focus, environmental history can best be differentiated from these disciplines in that its object of study remains human activity. While there is no rigid definition of the field of environmental history, John McNeill broadly defines it as ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature on which they depended’.² In this regard, it is not the study of an imagined nature or environment so much as a denial of the possibility of studying ‘the human’ without the ‘non-human’, however the latter may be defined. Environmental historians tend to emphasize the role of such non-human factors in shaping the course of historical events. For example, whereas periods of relative socio-economic disorder in a particular region may conventionally be attributed to internal and external political forces, economic shifts or changing sensibilities, environmental historians look to changes in climate, water, soil, disease environments or lived geography as possible explanatory factors. Since these non-human and human factors are inextricably linked, the study of environmental history becomes the study of historical ecology, i.e. the continually changing interactions between organisms, especially humans, and their abiotic or non-living environments.

As environmental factors such as water, microbes and air resist the constraints of the conventional boundaries of empires and nations, ecology brings an inherently global perspective. On the one hand, ecology is one arena where the perils of variant frameworks such as ‘world history’ become clear. Without some sort of material connection between different regions, a particular ‘world ecology’ is difficult to describe. On the other hand, ecology also widens the scope of global history to highlight connections that would otherwise go undetected. Even when humans themselves do not interact, they can still unwittingly be connected by climate, aspects of geography and the spread of microbes, plants and animals. In this regard, ecology also offers a means of representing inadvertent, unintentional or autonomous outcomes of human activity and movement.

In some instances, ecology has been used as a window onto the long-term impact of global interactions in a particular location. For example, William Cronon’s pioneering study of New England’s historical landscape examined how the different understandings of ecology and land use among American Indians and English settlers reshaped the forests of the region following European settlement.³ In other cases, the deliberate or undeliberate transfer of biological material, such as seeds and microbes, as a result of the establishment of new global connections has had far-reaching consequences in the realm of ecology and ultimately established an environmental link between two regions that had experienced relatively little prior contact. The history of globalization shows the extent to which long-distance travel and interaction can effect profound ecological transformation. As I explain below, the often unforeseen environmental consequences of global interaction have in turn fostered further globalization by creating a need for globalized ecological interventions. By virtue of their capacity to ‘act’, as it were, upon human societies, environmental factors, can accelerate globalization processes by encouraging coordination across different geographies, communities, states and institutions.

The movement of people and the emergence of new global interactions has catalyzed ecological transformations that have quietly shaped the modern world. At the same time, ecological issues requiring large-scale monitoring and organization of activities implemented on a global scale have served as an impetus for globalization. Thus, environmental history is a critical subset of the study of globalization. In this chapter, I outline these two complementary perspectives on globalization and ecology as reflected in extant literature, while also delineating some of the methods and sources commonly employed by environmental historians in their studying of the interplay between human and non-human factors.

Ecological exchanges

Within the pages of an unassuming cookbook entitled Antakya cuisine (Antakya mutfag˘ ı), published by the Antakya Rotary Club in 1990, recipes blending Syrian, Anatolian and Mediterranean flavors showcase the diverse dishes of modern Turkey’s southernmost province. Its preface presents Antakya, the descendent of ancient Antioch, as a place that has hosted numerous civilizations and cultures of the region over the centuries, thus cultivating a distinct and varied cuisine.⁴ However, the various Roman, Greek, Arab and Turkish culinary elements portrayed as having come to Antakya through centuries of conquest and interaction are complemented by other, unseen yet fundamental influences from even further afield. Among familiar staples such as chickpeas, eggplants, thyme and turnips, other products such as tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini and the numerous varieties of hot pepper deemed essential to the local cuisine stand as evidence of a massive and relatively recent shift in global diets. The latter group, all of which originate in the Americas and did not spread to the eastern Mediterranean until the past few centuries, are quotidian culinary traces of the impact of recent history’s most momentous movement of plants and organisms, an event commonly referred to as the ‘Columbian Exchange’.

When early crossings of the Atlantic and the emergence of European settlement in the Americas linked two hemispheres that had had scant prior contact, extraordinary transfers began to occur. While Europeans only gradually incorporated Mesoamerican chocolate and tomatoes into their diets, items such as tobacco and maize spread almost as fast as the news of trans-Atlantic travel, reaching regions such as the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century that had had virtually no direct contact with the Americas.⁵ Indeed, an American bird, the turkey, became associated with that empire in English because of being confused with exotic birds from the East that were already known in Europe. The apparent confusion in many languages regarding the origins of the turkey and its Columbian companions is a testament to the rapidity with which they spread.⁶ The same is likely to be true for other organisms, such as the bacteria that cause syphilis, a disease initially known to the Italians as the ‘French disease’, to the Germans as the ‘Italian disease’ and to the Ottomans as the ‘disease of the Franks’. Though the historical debate is not conclusive, the strong evidence indicating that syphilis in fact originated in the Americas highlights the ways in which non-human life forms have accompanied people wherever they have gone, largely without initial detection.⁷

The plants and organisms that have traveled with humans on their various longdistance journeys and which Alfred Crosby calls ‘portmanteau biota’ have in some cases been viewed as blessings and in others as scourges upon local and settler communities alike.⁸ While the spread of tubers and maize quickly revolutionized diets in Europe, Asia, and Africa by providing new sources of cheap calories, epidemic diseases such as smallpox and malaria spread throughout the Americas at such a rate that diseases of the eastern hemisphere had already taken their toll on indigenous populations long before European settlers began to access the Pacific coast. Whether syphilis or smallpox, the virulent nature of diseases among populations with little or no prior exposure or resistance (commonly referred to as ‘virgin-soil epidemics’), is evidence of the often unpredictable and devastating outcomes of ecological exchanges.⁹ In some cases, transfers proved latently catastrophic, as in the case of Ireland, where the introduction of potatoes was initially viewed as a boon, but where the outbreak of late blight, a plant disease of American origin that easily ravaged Ireland’s single-species potato population, gave rise to the potato famines of the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁰ Though neither the plight of American Indians nor Irish peasants could be traced solely to environmental factors, the general lack of conscious human agency in the historical spread of diseases has often led scholars to speak of bacteria as historical actors in their own right.

The same is often true for animal species that were part of the Columbian Exchange. Sheep, which proliferated uncontrollably in the absence of predators, have been blamed for extensive ecological degradation in Mexico during the colonial period.¹¹ In the Americas, South Africa and Australasia, large populations of ruminants replaced indigenous populations in even larger numbers than settlers themselves. In New Zealand today, merino sheep outnumber Kiwis by 9 to 1. The latter, however, have fared much better than the bird of the same name, the population of which has been devastated by the predation of Old World mammals, particularly stoats, which were deliberately introduced to the islands to counteract the proliferation of rabbits, which had also been imported, but subsequently became a menace to agriculture.¹² Humans’ spreading of one species often means the decline of another; once adopted by the American Indian populations of the plains, the domesticated horse, which had been brought to North America by Europeans, facilitated the large-scale hunting of the American bison to near-extinction even before bison were displaced by ranchers. Ultimately, the rise of the horse on the plains had far-r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Exchanges and movements
• Part 2 Continuities and processes
• Index