As I am still researching my short essay on the links between environmental history, history of empire and transnational history, I would like to use this post to outline some of my thoughts.
Having chosen to work on environmental issues, I realize, is extremely convenient for a module on transnational history: what better transnational thread of analysis can there be than climate change? Although early environmental history scholarship has focused on national environmental issues and policies, most environmental historians actively call for the adoption of alternative scales and spaces of analysis.
Adopting environmental lenses is an especially powerful mean to reconfigure the ‘geographies of empire’.
Indeed, studying global phenomena enable historians to free themselves from the nation state – colony framework. Some analyses take on a truly global perspective, jumping from one colony to another in one page, as they trace abnormal temperatures and death tolls. Others, disregarding traditional political boundaries discuss simultaneously settler and extraction colonies such as New Zealand and Egypt. If some studies adopt comparative approaches, most of them focus on transnational networks and exchanges, making the empire seem like one single entity integrated through “webs of empire” and environmental concerns.
A parallel tendency encouraged by those environmental lenses has been to ‘zoom in’ and put forward the inherently local character of empire. However global environmental phenomena can be, their consequences and the experiences people make of them are always grounded. Adopting a bottom-up approach starting from several case studies to then build a wider perspective is therefore one very common method among historians. If the local is the basis for the global, it also enables to challenge it, as each local site develops its own specific way of relating and responding to the environment. The empire thus becomes “glocal”, all at once a single entity and a mosaic of unique configurations.
At this point in my reading and thinking, I asked myself ‘so what?’. What is the use of shifting from a state-colony to a glocal frame of analysis? I still need to do a bit more reading about this, but the main idea is that it “decentres” the empire, or “provincializes” Europe, and changes our understanding of imperial power structures. Indeed, we soon realize that the traditional model of diffusion of ideas, resources and agency from Europe to the colonies is extremely simplifying, especially when working on environmental conservation ideas and practices. In fact, most of these ideas and practices developed in, and circulated between, the colonies, outside of the channels of exchanges with Europe. This challenges, in the field of the history of sciences for example, the idea of all-powerful European “centres of calculation”: the peripheries become the centre. Moreover, the glocal enables to reveal the agency of colonized populations who often actively participated or resisted to environmental conservation practices and thus, once again, to relativise the homogeneity of European imperial power.
I feel that I have already reflected on a lot on these themes but, as I keep coming across them in my readings, I felt the need to reformulate them once again, hopefully with some added value to my previous reflections.