Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean

Abstract

In line with the multi-disciplinary tenor of this volume, my aim in this Introduction is to weave between historiographical traditions that are often kept apart, focusing on the understandings that are generated when they are brought together. Imperial history has a longer and, some would say, more venerable tradition than environmental history, but this volume suggests that more explicit attention to their interpenetration might be worthwhile.1 Both, in particular, are beginning to share certain spatial conceptions of networks, space and place; conceptions that also characterise recent histories of science and historical geographies. These more relative spatial conceptions lend themselves particularly to histories of knowledge, of cultural contact and trade, of botanical and artistic exchange, of shifting environmental management regimes, and of medicine, in which human and nonhuman entities combine to form dynamic assemblages. The East India Company itself was one such assemblage, constituted as much by the commodities, specimens and artefacts, and the regimes of knowledge that it shifted around and beyond the Indian Ocean as by the merchants, sailors, lascars, officials, bureaucrats and ships that sustained their movements.