Image: The cover of the book is a light tan background with a very light grey partial illustration of the leaves of a plant extending across the upper left section. In the center of the cover is an old illustration of a pygmy hippo facing to the right side. They are standing on a tan ground sparsely populated with light green grass patches. Their flesh is a reddish brown. Across the top of the cover in reddish brown is the title of the bbook in capital letters, the word "empire" being larger than the others. Below that in smaller blue-green letters is "networks and agents of" in capital letters and "ecological change" in italicized text. Across the bottom are the editors' names in smaller, black, capital letters of the same font.
There is a very specific audience targeted by Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change. This is not necessarily unusual for an academic text, but I found this one had an exceptional amount of specificity in its focus. I am not an ecology historian PhD and I felt that while reading this book. I found that many of the essays would be far better understood by someone with an already longstanding, comprehensive understanding of worldwide colonial history. I do not. This does not make the book automatically bad. It was just not for me, and I do read academic works semi-frequently that are outside my field of education. It did not meet my expectations of the information I expected to find until the very last section.
My interest in this book came from wanting to know more about how imperialist colonization affected animals and others in various regions of the world. This book does make it clear that European imperialism and colonialism have resulted in environmental change and damage via the introduction of non-native and invasive species. It was just presented in a very Eurocentric manner. One of the writers reminds us that not everything can be defined by Western colonialism. Yet, I found that this book was defined by it. This could be from my own lack of education, so take that opinion with its source in mind.
What was not clear from the blurb is that this book is a collection of papers first presented at a 2015 conference at the University of Kassel, Germany. As I said, very specific. The authors are overwhelmingly white (passing, at least) and I am not sure if any of them are indigenous people. This may or may not be the reason that I found most of the essays to center the imperialist colonizers- often focusing on a single man's travels- rather than centering those negatively affected- the native people, nonhuman animals, and native plants- by said colonizers. The first two sections fall into this category whereas the last section- Animal Agency- finally started giving me what I came for. The rest were a slog to get through and the book reads far more like a journal than a book. That is not to say that there isn't huge overlap there in academic texts. But, most academic books I have read do not feel as if I am reading a periodical in sequence.
That said, once I got to the last section in the book, I did find myself interested in what the author's shared. "Animal Skins" details how colonialism and exotic animal trades negatively affect both indigenous human and nonhuman animal behaviors and populations. "Adapting to Change in Australian Estuaries" manages to make the intersection of settler colonialism and oyster prevalence interesting. "Brumbies as Colonizers" offers an example of how a non-native species can be more ethically accommodated and viewed after being non-consensually introduced into a non-native environment. I found all of these interesting and closer to what I was hoping to learn from this book.
Overall, this book is for academics with a very specific focus. It was not composed or written with a wide audience in mind- especially not the layman. On top of that, it is very specific in its sources both in author demographics and the original presentation of the papers at a single conference 5 years ago. That is not to say that the book is not necessary nor useful for those it is targeted at. It simply did not work very well for me.
This was also posted to my goodreads.
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