1st Edition
Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World Theory and Practice
Foreword Mike Hulme Introduction Sara Miglietti and John Morgan 1.Climate, travel and colonialism in the early modern world - Rebecca Earle 2. Jean Bodin and the idea of anachorism Richard Spavin 3. Marshes as microclimate: governing with the environment in early modern France Raphael Morera 4. Mastering north-east England's "River of Tine": efforts to manage a rvier's flow, functions and form 1529-c.1800 Leona Skelton 5. "Take plow and spade, build and plant and make the waste land fruitful": Gerrard Winstanley and the importance of labour Ashley Dodsworth 6. Winter and discontent in early modern England - William Cavert 7. “A considerable change of climate”: glacial retreat and British policy in the early-nineteenth-century Arctic - Anya Zilberstein 8."Vast factories of febrile poison": wetlands, drainage, and the fate of American climates, 1750-1850 - Anthony Carlson
Biography
Sara Miglietti is an Assistant Professor of French Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.
John Morgan is an environmental and social historian, and a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK.
Governing the Environment presents us with diverse and innovative scholarship on how early modern thinkers interpreted the complex relationships between people and their dynamic environments. Although focused on the past, this well-crafted volume provides fresh perspectives on current interrogations into what constitutes "nature" in light of the long history of politicized climate knowledge, the variable effects of human agency, and the challenges of environmental governance projects.
Mary Floyd-Wilson, University of North CarolinaWith learning lightly worn, these insightful essays illuminate the multiple, and ever-evolving, understandings of climate and the environment circulating in Western Europe and North America in the early modern centuries. They convincingly show how deeply environmental ideas, and management practices, were embedded in prevailing political and social orders - then as now.
John McNeill, Georgetown University
