St Helena as a Microcosm of the East India Company World

Abstract

Some of the first colonisations of the East India Company were not surprisingly on oceanic islands, as these were important stopping points for ships. The case of St Helena is an important story in this history of colonisation and significant in the history of the emergence of various scientific networks in the eighteenth century. Little attention has been paid to the influence of islands in the shaping of environmental history writing. This chapter hopes to fill this obvious gap by tapping to some useful environmental accounts of the island of St Helena in the early modern period.