Afterword

Abstract

This volume has been based on the premise that modern globalisation was an unprecedented global movement requiring us to rework the idea of scale in historical writings on environmental change. In this context, the networks and empire of the East India Company can be seen here as a spatial and temporal context for organising narratives about the natural world relating to a range of field sciences, such as botany and geology in particular and environmental change in general. The natural world encountered by the EIC was dominated, not only by the its gargantuan appetite for resource extraction, but also by a conviction that increased in the nineteenth century that European methods of ‘improvement’ would enhance productivity and harvesting of resources. In this process, the transfer and exchange of flora and fauna that had been occurring since the seventeenth century gave way to huge plantations for a range of products that included coffee, tea, sugar and cotton. By the end of the EIC period the imperial imperative was for relentless transformation and domination of people and lands in the distant regions of an Eastern empire. However, one cannot forget that this insatiable need to explore and exploit the far-flung frontiers of empire also encompassed a discourse that gave rise to an emergent conservationist language to describe peoples and landscapes; though one that was embedded within bureaucratic, centralised and coercive practice.