Offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world. Arnold considers the ways in which India’s material environment became increasingly subject to the colonial understanding of landscape and nature, and to the scientific scrutiny of itinerant naturalists.

Stretching 1,400 miles along the Australian coast and visible from space, the Great Barrier Reef is home to three thousand individual reefs, more than nine hundred islands, and thousands of marine species, and has alternately been viewed as a deadly maze, an economic bounty, a scientific frontier, and a precarious World Heritage site. Now the historian and explorer Iain McCalman takes us on a new adventure into the reef to reveal how our shifting perceptions of the natural world have shape...

'Though stronger evidence of this horrid practice prevailing among the inhabitants of this coast will scarcely be required, we have still stronger to give.' - Captain James Cook This Horrid Practice uncovers an unexplored taboo of New Zealand history - the widespread practice of cannibalism in pre-European Maori society. Until now, many historians have tried to avoid it and many Maori have considered it a subject best kept quiet about in public. Paul Moon brings together an impres...

After many thousands of years, the nomads are disappearing, swept away by modernity. Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomadic cultures – in Australia, north-west India, Tibet and the Indian Himalayas – and she herself calls three countries home. In this Quarterly Essay, she draws on her unique experience to delineate a vanishing way of life.In a time of environmental peril, Davidson argues that the nomadic way with nature offers valuable lessons. Cosmologies su...

An essential new history of ancient Ireland and the Irish, written as an engrossing detective storyAbout eighty million people today can trace their descent back to the occupants of Ireland. But where did the occupants of the island themselves come from and what do we even mean by “Irish” in the first place?This is the first major attempt to deal with the core issues of how the Irish came into being. J. P. Mallory emphasizes that the Irish did not have a single origin, but ...

A rambling philosophical work of travel writing with descriptive musings on Irish history and heritage from the award-winning author of Men Explain Things to MeIn this acclaimed exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit travels through Ireland, the land of her long-forgotten maternal ancestors. A Book of Migrations portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Enri...

Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands—Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand—whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology.

The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing brings together specialists from anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies to offer a broad and vibrant introduction to travel writing in English between 1500 and the present. This comprehensive introduction to the subject features specially commissioned contributions, including six essays surveying the period's travel writing; a further six focusing on geographical areas of particular interest - Arabia, the Amazon, Tahiti, Ireland, Calc...

Rivers have played an extraordinarily important role in creating the world in which we live. They create landscapes and provide water to people, plants and animals, nourishing both town and country. The flow of rivers has enthused poets and painters, explorers and pilgrims. Rivers have acted as cradles for civilization and agents of disaster; a river may be a barrier or a highway, it can bear trade and sediment, culture and conflict. A river may inspire or it may terrify. This Very Sho...

Probably the greatest mountaineer of his day,' claimed Kenneth Mason in his definitive mountaineering history, Abode of Snow. Haversham Godwin-Austen (1834-1923), from an ancient and interesting Surrey aristocratic family with royal connections, not only found the first way to the 'savage mountain', K2, but went on to be the first serious explorer of the Karakoram, Ladakh, Western Tibet, Bhutan, Northern Burma and Assam. He broke the Asiatic high-altitude mountaineering record three times,...

Environmental history in India has generated a rich literature on forests, wildlife, humananimal conflict, tribal rights and commercial degradation, displacement and development, pastoralism and desertification, famine and disease, sedentarism and mobility, wildness and civility, and the ecology versus equity debate.This reader brings together some of the best and most interesting writing on India’s ecological pasts. It looks at a variety of the country’s regions, landscapes, and arenas as se...

For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge, adventure, and fame, but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, from inte...