The Environmental Legacy of European Expansion and Colonialism: Three Controversies

Recent scholarship on the environmental impacts of European expansion has witnessed significant theoretical discordance. The debate, largely between those who draw upon Foucauldian analysis, postcolonial studies, and the cultural studies of science, on the one hand, and those informed by literatures in world history, intellectual history, economic history, and the history of science, technology and medicine; on the other, is relevant not just to the environmental history, but to our understanding of European colonialism more broadly. Yet, there has as yet been no systematic attempt to robustly identify the issues at stake, and debate them openly. The purpose of this essay is to address this gap. It addresses theoretical essays by anthropologist K. Sivaramakrishnan and others, and focuses on three central questions over which historians disagree.