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.
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Notes
A more general and extensive treatment of ideas of space in imperial history writing is A. Lester (2013), ‘Spatial Concepts and the Historical Geographies of British Colonialism’, in A. Thompson (ed.) Writing Imperial Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 118–42.
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In fiction see A. Ghosh (2009), Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray, and (2012), River of Smoke. London: Picador, and among historians, for example,
K. McPherson (1998), The Indian Ocean: A History of People and The Sea. Delhi: Oxford University Press;
T. Mecalf (2008), Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press; and most recently,
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Beattie, ‘Recent Themes’, 131–3, citing D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds.) (2006), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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See also K. Ward (2012), Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Something that was necessary, for instance, to write. A. Lester (2002) ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 54: 27–50.
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See D. Kumar, V. Damodaran and Rohan D’Souza (eds.) (2011), The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
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Lester, A. (2015). Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean. In: Damodaran, V., Winterbottom, A., Lester, A. (eds) The East India Company and the Natural World. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427274_1
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