II Ecology, Climate and Empirecolonialism and global environmentalhistory, 1400-1940Richard H. GroveAustralian National UniversityThe White n Horse PressCopyright Richard H. Grove 1997First Published 1997 by The White Horse Press, 10 High Street,Knapwell, Cambridge CB3 8NR, UKSet in 11 Point Adobe GaramondPrinted and Bound in Great Britain by BiddIes Ltd, King's LynnAll rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for thepurpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanicalorother means, including photocopying or recording, or in any informa-tion storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 1-874267-18-9 (HB); 1-874267-19-7 (PB)...:For VinitaAcknowledgementsContentsIXIntroduction 11. The Evolution of the Colonial Discourse on Deforestationand Climate Change 1500-1940 52. Conserving Eden: The (European) East India Companiesand their Environmental Policies on St Helena, Mauritiusand in Western India, 1660-1854 373. Scottish Missionaries, Evangelical Discourses and the Origins'of Conservation Thinking in Southern Africa, 1820-1900 864. The East India Company, the .(\ustralians and the El Nifio:Colonial Scientists and Ideas about Global Climatic Changeand Teleconnections between! 1770 and 1930 1245. Chiefs, Boundaries and Sacred Woodlands: EarlyNationalism and the Defeat of Colonial Conservationismin the Gold Coast and Nigeria, 1870-1916 1476. Colonial Conservation, Ecological Hegemony andPopular Resistance: Towards a Global Synthesis 179Index 225Richard Grove was born in Cambridge in 1955. After a schooling inGhana and England he graduated in Geography from Hertford CollegeOxford in 1979. Following a graduate schooling in Conservation atUniversity College London he took a PhD at Cambridge University inHistory and was subsequently a BritishAcademy Research Fellow and aFellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars inWashington DC. Currently he is a Senior Fellow of the Institute ofAdvanced Studies at tire Australian National University, and a lifemember ofClare Hall, Cambridge. He is founder-editor of the interna-tional journal Environment and History. His books include The Cam-bridgeshire CoproliteMining Rush(1976), TheFutureforForestry (1983),TheSSSI Handbook (1985), Conservation in Africa: People, Policies andPractice (1987) Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical IslandEdens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600-1800 (1995) andNatureand the Orient: theEnvironmentalHistory ofSouthand SoutheastAsia(1997). Major parts ofthis book were created while he was a Fellowof the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and a LeverhulmeTrust Award-holder at the University of Cambridge and the AncientIndia and Iran Trust, Cambridge, U.K. ~ '.r i / ~. ~AcknowledgementsThis book represents a long period ofmy research life, but is particularlythe fruit ofmy associations with the Australian National University andthe History ofScience Department at Cambridge. During the course ofit I have incurred many personal and intellectual debts most ofwhich Icannot hope to repay. The work originated in my own environmentalactivism. In that respect I should like to pay tribute to the work ofChrisRose, Charles Secrett and Andrew Lees. Andrew, sadly, died in tragiccircumstances in Madagascar, while he was, characteristically, confront-ing major logging and mining interests in the region. .In the last fewyears Polly Hill has been a great friend and mentor and Ihope that she will like this book. Her work on economic anthropologyin West Mrica, begun while at the University ofGhana, is unparalleled.Moreover, her sharp awareness of the signficance of the forest environ-ment and the history ofland use change in the context ofcocoa and dryland farming in Ghana and Nigeria inspired me to take up an interest inWest Mrica, the results ofwhich appear as a chapter in this book. PeterHerbst, another emeritus academic ofthe University of Ghana, has alsoinspired me with his historical ihsights and commitment to the cause offorest protection in NewSouth;Wales. In Canberra I would particularlylike to thank Janet Copland, a iprominent green activist who made mytransition to Australia much easier than it might have been. The bookwas originally started while I was a Fellow of the National HumanitiesCenter in Durham, North Carolina in 1996. In that congenial place Idrew richly from the great knowledge of Wayne Pond, Mario Klarer,Tim Breen and many others. At the Forest History Society in nearbyDurham I was greatly helped by Pete Steen and Cheryl Oakes, and theirstaff, aswell as by the great resources ofthe Book Exchange, the' greatestbookshop in the South'. Asusual, John Richards and BetsyFlint were myfriends and intellectual guides at Duke University. Many of the ideas inthis book were first tried out at seminars at the Cabinet of NaturalHistoryin the HistoryofScience Department in Cambridge, aswe began, ,ito build up the Global Environmental History Unit. At Cambridge too,Clare Hall has been a great source of scholarlysupport, principallythrough the agency of Gillian Beer and Wenda, who knows everythingthat goes on. In Malawi John Killick was a most hospitable host, and agreat raconteur ofthe myths ofthe Mulange forests. William Beinart andBarry Supple have, asever, been wonderfully constant friends and guides.At the Australian National University, which has now become a majorworld centre for environmental history, I have benefited greatly from the'enjoyable but rigorous intellectual company of Graeme Snooks, BarrySmith, Mark Elvin, Tim Bonyhady and John Dargavel.I should also like to thank James Cormack, Nick Jardine, SimonSchaffer, Ranabir Chakravarti, Mahesh Rangarajan, Ravi Rajan, ColyerDawkins, JeffBurley, Quentin Cronk, RichardTucker, DeepakKumar,Satpal Sangwan, Sita Damodaran, Martin Abdullahi, Richard Drayton,Ajay Skaria, RobertAnderson, Peggy Harper, Vera White, Ann Chivers,Adrian Walford and Piers Vitebsky. lowe a great deal to Andrew andAlison Johnson for pulling the book together so efficiently.I am grateful to Manchester University Press for permission to includeChapters 1 and 6. A version ofthe former appeared as 'Imperialism andthe discourse ofdesiccation' in M. Bell, R. Butlin and M. Heffernan, eds,Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940 (Manchester Univer-wr Press,1995); the latter was first published in John Mackenzie, ed., Im!flrialismand theNatural World(Manchester University Press, 1990). CakbridgeUniversity Press kindly gavepermission to reprint Chapter 2, wHichfirstappeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, XX (1993), pp.318-351. Chapter 3 originally appeared in Journal ofSouthern AfricanStudies, 15 (1989), pp. 163-187; this journal is nowpublished byCarfaxPublishing Company, PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, whosepermission to reproduce the chapter is duly acknowledged.Finally, I should like to thank the Australian National University, theLeverhulme Trust and the BritishAcademy for their financial support ofresearch published here.Canberra Day, March 17th 1997Ecology, Climate and EmpireThegorge ofthe Torakudu river, as it was drawn by Captain D.Hamilton on Hugh Cleghorn sexpedition to theAnnamalai Mountains,South India, in 1851. (From Cleghorn, The Forests and Gardens ofSouth India)Introductionbook aims to serve as an introduction to a relatively new area ofresearch on the environmental history ofthe European colonial empires.There are at least two major reasons why the history of the colonialperiphery is now emerging as vital to an understanding of the develop-ment of perceptions of the global environment, both for historians andhistorians ofscience. Firstly, it was in the tropical colonies that scientistsfirst came to a realisation ofthe extraordinary speed at which people, andEuropeans in particular, could transform and destroy the natural envi-ronment. Above all the environments of tropical islands played a veryprominent part in this development ofmental perceptions. Secondly, thecolonial context also stimulated a dramatic growth in scientific and stateinterest in the apparent links between climate change and deforestation.This led directly to a series of state programmes directed at large scaleforest conservation, especiallyin the French and British colonial empiresand then, more latterly, in the western 'frontier empire' of the UnitedStates and its colonies. Manyofthy 'experts' involved in this process werewhat we might now term 'environmentalists', at least from a post-hocperspective, with all the limitations that involves. Nevertheless, thedepth and sophistication of their' concerns considerably pre-dated theemergence of comparable notions in Europe. Their preoccupations areespecially topical to the climatic and environmental worries of today.The structure ofthe book is essentially chronological. It will soonbe apparent to the reader that I have placed considerable emphasis on thecritical importance ofIndia to the course ofdevelopments in climatic andconservation thinking in the rest of the world. The story of the involve-ment of the British East India Company in natural history and then inforest management was of particular importance. This may come as asurprise when one considers the undoubted commercial priorities of anorganisation that was, in some senses, a forerunner of the majortransnational companies that emerged in the late nineteenth century.But the East India Company was also an intrinsically Indian institutionand one that placed far more value on indigenous expertise than its Raj.successor. As a result its experts were able to 'absorb a great deal ofsignificant local knowledge about the environment and tosuggest strategies for its management based on local fear offamine and gross agrarian failure was a vital factor In bringing aboutstructures for forest, soil and water conservation, as the first two chaptersof the book make clear. The spectre of famine, particularly after thedisastrous drought episode of 1862, was also a major in the adventof state conservation in South Mrica, the story told In three.Although conservation and climatic thinking in Africa wereheavily derivative of concepts first .thought. In India and Mau-ritius the colonial environmental discourse InMnca owed a great deal the maverick campaigning and writing of one man, John CroumbieBrown. In particular Brown successfully propagandised the idea ofregional and global desiccation and climate change brought about by the'evils' of deforestation. . .However, it fell to scientists in Indian and thenAustralian colonialemploy to collect evidence for global climate change,a concern that arose initially out of failures In the Indian monsoon. Wenowknow that these were often closely related to severe El Nifio currentevents, periodic climatic episodes triggered by unusually warm currents off the coast of Peru. The history of the discovery of patterns and correlations involved in change by operating at the colonial periphery IS detailed In chapte.r f0'tL ThISaccount should help to finally put paid to the idea populansedh' somehistorians that science in the colonies was inherently secondary'and farfrom the cuttingedge offundamental discovery. In fact, the reverse to have been the case in many of the medical, field and meteorologicalsciences. Indeed, the idea ofa monolithic colonial scientific mentality one that needs to be seriously questioned. The links between metropoli-tan 'centres of calculation' and the activities of colonial scientists wereoften of a tenuous and ambivalent kind. Instead, the relations betweenI al colonial experts and local colonial administrations were probablyoc Wh . dimore important than researchers have previously thought. . ere In Ig-enous people were employed as scientists by the ashappened as early as the 1830s in India and by the 1880s In Nigeria, thepicture was an even more complex one.3IntroductionHowever, there is no doubt that the introduction of oftendraconian colonial forest and land management structures, albeit de-signed to check climate change and promote sustainable resource use,actuallybrought about frequent clashes and contests over land use. Thesetypically involved the colonial state, private companies and local peopleas separate and competing actors in contests of governance, protest andmanipulation. In some instances colonised peoples succeeded in block-ing the advent of state forest or soil conservation and then turning thecolonial programmes to their own ends. This is the picture presented inchapter five. More frequently, as I make clear in the concluding chapter,the enforcement ofcolonial attempts at environmental control resultedin a whole typology ofresistance and reaction by indigenous peoples andcolonial inhabitants. These reactions were often the catalyst to violentandsignificant political changes, ranging right through from the Ameri-can Revolution to the Mau-Mau revolt.In many ways the business of empire, for most of the colonised,had far more to do with the impact of different modes of colonialresource control and colonial environmental concepts, than it had to dowith the direct impact of military or political structures. Some groupsgained from the new forms ofcontrol, while many others clearly lost out.Some colonial officials favoured indigenous environmental knowledgeand criticised the application ofwestern methods, while other officialspreferred to see the 'native' as uniformly profligate and possessed of nouseful environmental insights. By and large the latter perception tendedto win the day, but it was by no means always the case.Why is it worth studying these past struggles over land use andenvironmental meaning and mechanism? There are many reasons,practical and academic. But not least is the fact that in the post-colonialperiod, many 'independent' governments, most ofthem actually run byisolatedsocial elites, have tended to repeat, sometimes even more crudelyand brutally, the arrogant environmental mistakes made by their colonialpredecessors. Frequently they have displayed the same disdain anddisrespect for indigenous and traditional knowledge. Large-scale prestigeprojects for dam-building, irrigation, land development and afforesta-tion or deforestation have proved to be just as seductive to post-colonialas to colonial governments, and past mistakes have simply been re-runon much larger scales. Some of them might have been avoided, givenEcology, Climateand Empire 2sufficient historical insight. Moreover, current.and fashionable worriesabout climate change and global warming actually have a very longpedigree that mlghrwell repay.careful study, respect to theambivalent and difficult relations between sciennsts and the state.Current preoccupations with a 'global' environmental crisisaboutpollution, climate change and resource over-use are now the problem ofeveryman and everywoman and ofall But in the earlydays ofempire by the dramatic globaltsatlon ofeconomic andnatural transformations that was enabledduring the colonial period. Theoften (although not always) grievous ecological impact ofwesternisationand empire, which took centuries to take effect, is now felt almosteverywhere, and is probably irreversible. It is this which has forced an environmental agenda upon historians, amongmany others. But it has, I think, also forced a new historical agenda uponthe scientists. These people, no longer always seen favourably as theharbingers ofan unalloyed progress and prosperity, now find themselvesneeding to seek insights in historical pattern and analysis. To take oneexample, we can only understand the complex dynamics and undoubt-edly profound impact of the EI Nifio current on world climate andeconomies by a sophisticated interpretation of archival sources. As yet,this task has barely been commenced.It is probably a measure ofthe growing relevance ofenvironmen-tal history to human affairs that its academic centre of nowshifted firmly away from North America and Europe to Sl1\1tth andSoutheast Asia and Africa. Perhaps not surprisingly it is inIndia that the historiography of the subject has become especfally richand well developed. Indeed much ofthe environmental history ofSouthAsia (and elsewhere) is being written by individuals who started theircareers as environmental activists. But this is reallynothing new. WilliamRoxburgh, the pioneer ofclimatology in India, and Hugh Cleghorn, thepioneer offorest protection, were.themselves environmental rians, ever ready to irritate authority and breakwith orthodoxy. I beltevethat they would have appreciated and thoroughly understood thegrowing importance ofenvironmental history in the tropics today. Thisbook is intended to encourage that development.4 Ecology, Climate andEmpire1The Evolution of the Colonial Discourseon Deforestation and Climate Change,1500-1940Concepts of artificially induced climatic change have a much longerhistory than one might imagine.' Nowadays, of course, they havebecome a part of our popular culture, and part of a widespread andpossibly justifiable environmental neurosis. They are especially familiarand useful in providing the justification for newplans to prevent tropicaldeforestation and reduce outputs ofcarbon dioxide into the atmosphere.It is, moreover, not well known that the fear ofartificially causedclimate change, and much of the modern conservation thinking whichthat anxiety stimulated, developed specifically in the tropical colonialcolltext.2These fears and these connections attained their most vigorousforms, in terms of deliberate state policy, during the heyday of imperi-alism. After about 1750 a fewlearned societies at the metropolitan centrehad begun to playa major role in formulating and then propagandisingideas about deforestation, desiccation and climate change, often as a basisfor proposing large scale forest 40nservation. The Royal Society, theRoyal Society ofAr ts, the Acaderniedes Sciences and, above all, the RoyalGeographical Society were pre-eminent in this activity. However, theantecedents ofthis institutional advocacy have to be sought very early onin the history of colonialism. This chapter seeks to narrate the develop-ment of ideas about climate change and 'desiccationism' through fromtheir earliest emergence to their current prominence in our own times.An awareness of the detrimental effects of colonial economicI For more specific regional details of this see Chapter 2.2 See R.H. Grove, 'The origins ofenvironmentalism', Nature (London), 10 May 1990,pp. 5-11.3 There is no single useful work on the environmental impact ofcolonial rule. Howeversee the useful secondary summaries in Clive Ponting's A greenhistory of the world(London, 1991); and the useful regional study by David Watts, The WestIndies:pattemsofdevelopment, cultureandenvironmentalchange, since 1492 (Cambridge, 1987).Aplagueofsheep, by Elinor Melville (Cambridge, 1994) tackles the environmental impact ofSpanish colonisation and horse-culture in 16th century Mexico. The most useful contextualisation ofTheophrastus is in C. Glacken, Traces on theRhodianshore (Berkeley, 1967).5 See Edmund Halley, 'An account of the watry circulation of the sea, and of the causeofsprings', Philosophical Transactions ofthe RoyalSociety, 192:17 (1694), pp, 468-472,activity and, above all, of capitalist plantation agriculture {the potentialprofits from which had stimulated much early colonial settlement}developed initially on the small island colonies of the Portuguese andSpanish at the Canary Islands and Madeira." it was on these islands thatthe ideas first developed by the Greek naturalist Theophrastus in hisessays on deforestation and climate change were revived and graduallygathered strength. as his works were translated and widely publishedduring the Renaissance.' For example Columbus, according to one ofhisbiographers,feared, on the basis ofhis knowledge ofwhat had happenedafter deforestation in the Canaries, that similar devastation in the WestIndies would cause major rainfall decline.Certainly these ideas were already fashionable by 1571 whenFernandez Oviedo, in Costa Rica, soon followed by Francis Bacon andEdmund Halley in England, began to theorise about the connectionsbetween rainfall, vegetation and the hydrological cycle.5EdmundHalley'sfieldwork on this subject, carried out in 1676 on the island ofSt Helenaduring a summer vacation, while he was a student at Queen's CollegeOxford, showed remarkable insight. Furthermore it was on St Helenathat some of the earliest and best documented attempts were made toprevent deforestation and control soil erosion, both of which wereserious by the end of the seventeenth century. These attempts wereelaborately recorded by officials of the English East India Company,which controlled the island. However the early conservation wpthodsand local environmental thinking developed before 1750 on suchas St Helena, and also in a similar fashion on, Barbados and Moiserrat,were purely empirically based, localised and often in7Evolutionofthe Colonial Discourse 6Indeed. they were not based on any coherent body ofclimatic theory, despite the knowledge ofTheophrastus' desiccationisthypotheses that already existed in some intellectual circles in Europe andSouth America.The increasingly complex infrastructures of colonial rule underthe British and French after the mid-eighteenth century provided thebasis for the kinds of information networks needed to systematically information on a global basis and to respond toperceived environmental crises with effective forms of environmentalcontrol based on unitary climate theories. These information networkswere based primarily on the botanic gardens ofEurope and the coloniesand were a direct consequence of the rapid growth in interest ineconomic plant transfer and agricultural development which took placebetween 1750 and 1850,7 But these networks were not sufficient on their As I shall argue in this paper the development of conservationist'Ideas.and. early concern was also critically dependent onthe diffusion ofdesiccation concepts, or the formulation ofadesiccationist to rainfall reduction. Developingnotionsof specIes ranty, extinctions and endemism also played a significantalthough secondary part in early environmentalism." To some extent itseems that the colonial networks of botanical exchange and the botanic6 Detailed information on the environmbntal history of the West Indies and on earlconservation thinking on the islands cati be found in Watts, The WestIndies. For casestudr ofMontserrat seeLydi1a M. Pulsipher, Seventeenth centuryMontserrat:an enoironmental Impactstatement(London, Institute ofBritish Geographers, HistoricalGeography Research Series no. 14, 1986).7 there is as yet no coherent account of the growth of these networks ona global basis, For a sketchy and doctrinaire but still useful account of colonial botanicgardens see M. Brockway, Science and colonial expansion: the roleofthe BritishRoyalBotanic (New YO,rk, 1979). Richard Drayton, Nature'sGovernment(NewJ:!aven, Yale University Press, In press) deals with the ideology and politics behind therise of the Kewsystem. The origins of the Dutch colonial system ofplant exchange areusefully for the seventeenth century by J. Heniger in Hendrik Van Reede totDrakenstemand the Hortus Malabaricus: a contributionto the study ofcolonialbotany(Rotterdam, 1986).8 My of the origins of western environmentalism clearly differs in itsemphasis on the Importance of the periphery from such orthodox explanations as thatEcology, Climateand Empire 6given in David Pepper, The roots ofmodernenvironmentalism (London, 1986). Morerecent work has been far more insightful than that of Pepper in its stress on thesignificance of Rousseau's circle in provoking a new environmental consci0utl\c;ss, see,for example, G.F. Lafreniere, 'Rousseau and the European roots of EnvironmentalHistory Review, 14 (1990), pp. 241-273. Even Lafreniere, how;;jer, doesnot recognise the direct impact ofRousseau' s thinking on the beginnings ofcon?Frvationin the French colonial context. Perhaps the best regional work to date on the earlyhistoryof conservation is L. Urteaga, La Tierra Esquilmada; lasideas sabrela conseruacion de lanaturaleza en la cultura espanola del siglo XVIII (Barcelona, Serbal\CSIC, 1987).9 The best study to date on the working and social influence ofa single colonial scientificinstitution is probably J. E. Maclellan, Colonialism and science: Saint Dominique in theOld Regime (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).to Emma Spary, 'Climate, natural history and agriculture, the ideology of botanicalnetworks in eighteenth century France and its colonies', unpublished paper presented atthe International Conference on Environmental Institutions, St Vincent, West Indies,April 1991. See also Emma Spary, 'Making the natural order: the Paris Jardin du Roi,1750-1795' (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1993).II SeeK.Thompson, 'Forests and climatic change inAmerica: some earlyviews', ClimaticChange, 3 (1983); pp.47-64.9--------Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourse,I12 For a typical contemporary expression of these views see Edward Long, A history ofJamaica, (London, 1777), vol.3, pp. i-iv.13 For the significance of tree-planting in Britain at this time see K. Thomas, Man andthenatural world: changingattitudesin England1500-1800 (London, 1983); F. Perlin,Afbresjourney: the role ofwoodin thedevelopment ofcivilization (New York, 1989); andS. Daniels, 'The political ieonographyofwoodland', in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, Theiconography oflandscape (Cambridge, 1988).14 For the earlyprogrammes and ideology of the Royal SocieryofArts seeD. G. C. Adams,William Shipley: fOunder of the Royal Society ofArts, a biography with documentation(London, Scolar Press, 1979); and Henry Trueman Wood, A history oftheRoyalSocietyofArts (London, John Murray, 1913).15 J. Woodward, 'Some thoughts and experiments concerning vegetation', PhilosophicalTransactions oftheRoyalSociety, 21 (1699), pp. 196-227.Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.PThe business of forest protection and tree-planting had thusacquired, by the late eighteenth century, far more acute meanings in thecolonial setting than it had in contemporary Europe. 13 The timing ofthedevelopment ofcolonial forest protection actually depended both on theexistence and complexityofinstitutions with an intellectual involvementin the colonies and on the pattern of diffusion of desiccationist ideas.Whilst the Royal Society had taken an early interest in forest preserva-tion, colonial deforestationwas not a concern ofthe Society, even thoughit played a part in the development of the desiccationist discourse in thelate seventeenth century. Instead the institutional connection betweendesiccation ideas and the colonial environment was made in the wake ofthe foundation of the Society of Arts in 1754.14Simultaneously theAcademic des Sciences developed an interest in the matter, so that theintercourse between French and British intellectuals became of primeimportance in the development of colonial environmentalism andindeed remained so until the mid nineteenth century.The elaboration of early desiccation ideas into complex physicaland biological theories depended at first on the work of]ohnWoodwardat Gresham College in London ( the founder ofthe first chair in geologyat Cambridge University) in establishing the basic principles of transpi-ration.P In his Vegetable Staticks of 1726 Stephen Hales of CorpusChristi College, Cambridge refin1d this work further in estimating theamount of moisture contributed by trees to the atrnosphere.P Buffon'sEcology, Climate and Empire 8gardens themselves acted as social institutions that encouraged the slowdevelopment of an environmental consciousness."The linking of deforestation to climatic change and rainfallreduction (the essence ofdesiccationism) laid the basis for the initiationand proliferation ofcolonial forest protection systems after the Peace'ofParis in 1763, particularly in the West Indies. The intense interest whichdeveloped during the eighteenth century, particularly in France, intheories linking climate to theories ofcultural 'degeneration' and humanevolution assisted this process." But after about 1760 empirical observa-tions of deforestation and the impact of droughts in the colonies werenow complemented by the widespread promulgation of desiccationisttheories by metropolitan institutions in Britain and France, and espe-cially by the Academic des Sciences in France and the Society ofArts inBritain. While deforestation in temperate countries, especially in NorthAmerica, tended to be seen as beneficial, quite the opposite viewpertained in many of the tropical colonies by the late eighteenthcentury. I I Climatic change, it was believed, threatened not only theeconomic well-being of a colony but posed hazards to the integrity andhealth of the settler populations of the plantation colonies of the16 A. Clark-Kennedy, Stephen Hales, DD, FRS: an eighteenth century biography (Cam-bridge, 1929). SeeStephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (London, 1727), p. 20. Hales oweda great deal to the pioneering chemical work of the Leiden establishment and citedHermann Boerhave's New Method ofChemistry translated into English in 1727 by P.Shaw and E. Chambers.'7 Duhamel du Monceau, Dessemisetplantations desarbresetde leurculture(Paris, 1760).18 Royal Society of Arts Archives, John Adam Street, London WI, Members' Files.19 R. Rompkey, Soame[enyns (Boston Mass., Twayne Publishers, 1984)j and 'SoarneJenyns, M.P., a curious case of membership',]ournal ofthe Royal Society ofArts, 120(1972), pp. 532-542. See also PRO/CO/I02/1, beginning 'representations of thecommissioners', Public Record Office, Kew, UK.20 Public Record Office, Kew, UK. Ref. No. COI06/9j COI0l/1 No. 2611 Evolution ofthe Colonial Discoursereserves, based on the same theory and with the same intellectualprecedents, were established on Mauritius (then known as the Isle deFrance) by Pierre Poivre, the Commissaire-Intendant of the colony.?!We know that Poivre had been an advocate ofcolonial forest protectionfor some time and that he had given, in 1763, a major speech in Lyonson the climatic dangers of deforestation. 22 This speech may go down inhistory as one ofthe first environmentalist texts to be based explicitly ona fear ofwidespread climate change.Poivre's forest conservation programmes on Mauritius were en-couraged by a government of physiocratic sympathies and by thebotanists ofthe Jardin du Roi in Paris. 23 In the British Caribbean colonieson the other hand, the more autonomous institutional influence of theSociety ofArts remained critical to promoting tree planting and, to alesser extent, forest conservation. The Society had been instrumental infounding the botanic garden at Kingstown on St Vincent, the first suchgarden in the western hemisphere.F" It was the existence of this gardenand the activities of its superintendents, particularly those ofAlexanderAnderson, a Scottish physician, that ensured institutional support forfurther forest protection measures in the Caribbean, especially on StVincent and the other islands of the Grenada Governorare.P On St21 See J.R. Brouard, The woods and ,forests of Mauritius (Port Louis, Mauritius,Government Printer, 1963). I22 Lecture to the Agricultural SocietyofLyons, MS no. 575, folio 74, pp. 27-29; Archivesof the Bibliorheque Centrale du Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.23 Louis Malleret, Pierre Poiure (Paris, Physiocracywas an economic philosophydevelop.edafter about 1757 in France byFrancois Quesnayand the Marquis de Mirabeauand their colleagues. It attempted to relate economic systems to the workings ofnaturalsystems. It was an economic philosophy that was very hostile to the unrestricted activityofspeculative bullion and investment markets and to absentee landlordism. Physiocracyencouraged the application ofscience to agriculture and commerce but saw agricultureas the most important economic activity. ,24 See Premiums by the Society established at London for the encouragement ofArts,Manufactures andCommerce, issue dr 10June 1760. The society offered large cash prizesfor tree and in this case for the establishment of a botanic garden, which itadvocated In 1760. The garden was actually founded in 1763 by Robert Melville, the firstGovernor of the Grenada Governorate. See R. Dossie, Memoirs ofagriculture, vol. 3(London, 1789), p. 800.Ecology, Climate and Empiresubsequent translation ofHales'sworkcame to the-attention ofDuhameldu Monceau, the great French meteorologist and, In apopular work on tree-planting, published in 1760, du Monceau devel-oped the connections between trees and climate at length. I? These ideaswere then transferred across the channel once again and were widelydiscussed at meetings of the new Society of Arts, which included theMarquis de Turbilly, the Comte d'Abeille and other members of theAcademie des Sciences among its members. 18 However the whole mattermight have remained academic had it not been for the fact that at leasttwo members of the Society of Arts also served as members of thepowerful Lords Commissioners for Trade in the Colonies, the bodyresponsible for planning land-use in the new West Indies possessions.The most significant of these figures was Soame Jenyns, the MPfor Cambridge.l" It seems to have been due to his influence that the LordsCommissioners were apprised ofdesiccation ideas at some point between1760 and 1763. With the signingofthe Peace ofParis in 1763 the CededIsles ofSt Vincent, St Lucia, Grenada and Tobago all came under Britishrule. As part oftheir plans for the survey and division oflands on the isles,all of them still inhabited by substantial numbers of Carib Indians, theLords Commissioners made provision for the gazetting oflarge areas ofmountain land as forest reserve, for 'the protection of the rains' .20 Thesewere the first forest reserves ever to be established with a view topreventingclimate change. The most extensive ofthem, on the ofnorth-western Tobago, is still in existence. In 1769 some very'(tinilar ?10,

FIIA sectionofthe King's Hill ForestAct of1791, delineating the bounds12 Ecology, Climate and Empire Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourseofthe reserve, one ofthe world'sfirst climatic reserves. (Courtesy PRO)13Vincent a comprehensive law was passed in 1791 to protect the KingsHill Forest with the specific intention of preventing rainfall change."This legislation was subsequently imitated on St Helena and subse-quently in IndiaYIncidentally a major stimulus to forest protectionactivities in 1790 and 1791 was the occurrence ofdroughts in tropicalregions on a global scale." These events appear to have been caused byan unusually strong El Nifio current in those years, which caused severedrought in Southern India, Australia, St Helena and the West Indies aswell as at locations in central America, especially in Mexico."Once colonial forest protection ideas, based on desiccation theo-25 There is as yet no useful of comprehensive biography of Alexander Anderson'sextraordinarylife. But seeLancelot Guilding,An account ofthebotanicgarden in theislandofSt Vincent (Glasgow, 1825) for some biographical details.26 The act was proclaimed at St Vincent on 2 April 1791. The second reading of the billfor the Act had taken place in the St Vincent Assembly on 13 November 1788. PROC0263\21.27 See Chapter 2.28 For case-studies of the way in which the El Nifio current has historically had a globalimpact see Michael Glantz, ed., Teleconnections linking worldwide climate anomalies:scientific basis and social impact (Cambridge, 1991).29 For details of the unusual strength of the El Nifio current in the years 1790-1792 (aswell as for details of evidence of other major El Nifio events see W.H. Quinn and V.T.Neal, 'El Nifio occurrences over the past four and a halfcenturies' .fournal Research, vol. 92 no. Cl3 (1987), pp. 14449-14461. The strength of the Nifiowas recorded by J. H. Unanue in El climade Lima (Madrid, 1815)'1,"In the West Indies detailed records of the 1791 droughts appear in the of the LegislativeAssemblyof Montserrat for the year 1791, dt 13August 179{(Petitionof the Council to the Governor of the Leeward Islands), Archives of the Colony ofMontserrat, Public Library, Plymouth, Montserrat, BWI. On St Helena the 1791droughts are recorded in H.R. Janisch, Extractsfrom theSt Helena Records (Jamestown,1908), p. 202, entrydt25 June 1791. Bad as the drought was inSt Helena in 1791-1792it was 'much more calamitous in India' (Alexander Beatson, Tracts relative totheislandofSt Helena, writtenduringa residency offive years [London, 1816], p. 198). Beatsonrecorded that 'owing to a failure of rain during the above two years, one half of theinhabitants in the northern circar had perished by famine and the raminder were sofeebleand weak that on the report of rice coming up from the Malabar coast five thousandpeople left Rajamundry and very fewof them reached the seaside although the distanceis only fifty miles'. Beatson had culled this information from aletter written by Dr JamesAnderson, Curator of the Madras Nopalry Garden, to Robert Kyd, curator of theCalcutta botanic garden. The evidence for the 1791 drought in Australia is impression-istic but decisive. By the end of 1791 the Tank Stream, the main water supply for theconvict colony at Port Jackson, had dried up and 'tanks' were cut in the bed of the streamto conserve water. Drawings of the colony in early 1792 show that the stream was stillempty, while in later pictures of Sydney the stream isalwaysfull; seeT. McCormick, Firstviews of'Australia 1788-1825 (Sydney, 1987).30 This emerges in the correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks; seeW. R. Dawson, ed., TheBanksletters: a calendar ofthe manuscript correspondence ofSirjoseph Bankspreserved inthe British Museum, London(London, 1958).31 Alexander Anderson, 'Geography and History of St Vincent', and 'Delugia', bookmanuscripts, Archives of the Linnaean Society, London.32 Bruno Latour, We haveneverbeen modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).1Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourseries, were firmly installed, notably on Tobago, St Vincent, St Helena andMauritius, they acquired a momentum of their own, assisted byemerg_ing colonial botanic garden information networks, and particularly thelines of communication between the gardens at St Vincent, St Helena,Cape Town, Mauritius and Calcutta.t" The influence of the metropoli-tan centres in these networks was actually relatively weak. This remainedthe case even after Sir Joseph Banks began his period of dominance ofbotanical science in Britain and Kew began to achieve pre-eminence.Although aware ofthe possibilities ofenvironmental change, not least onSt Helena, Banks cannot be counted among the major environmentalistpioneers. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew only became a significantplayer in colonial conservation after Sir William Hooker became Super-intendent in the 1830s.Probably the first environmental theorist in the British colonialcontext to parallel the pioneeringwork ofPierre Poivre and his colleagueBernardin de St Pierre on Mauritius was Alexander Anderson. HisGeography and History ofSt Vincent, written in 1799, and his Delugia,an early geological history of the world, mark him out as a visionaryenvironmental thinker and the pioneer of a generation of surgeon-conservationists and geographers." The colonial expertise of men suchasAnderson and Poivre meant that the role ofmetropolitan institutionsin initiating 'centres of environmental calculation' (to adapt the termi-nology ofBruno Latour)32remained relatively unimportant and deriva-tive. Even much later, after 1800, the emergence of a school of environ-mentalists in India in the ranks of the East India Company medicalEcology) Climateand Empire 1433 See R.H. Grove, Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical islandEdens, and theorigins ofenviromnentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995).34 British Library, India Office Library and Records (IOL) ref no. F4\4\427. For detailsof Roxburgh's tree-planting experiments in Bengal and Bihar seeHome Public Consul-tations letters, National Archives ofIndia, New Delhi; especially letters dated 31 Jan1798 and 23 May 1813, and 'Botanic garden' letters, 1816-1817. His methods aredetailed in HPC, NAl Letter dt. 23 October 1812, E. Barrett (Acting Collector ofBauleah) to Richard Rocke, Acting President and member of the Board of Revenue, FortWillliam, Calcutta.35 Alexander von Humboldt, 'Sur les lines isothermes et de la distribution de la chaleursur le globe', Societe d'Arcueil, Memoires, 3 (l817), pp. 462-602.36 See Chapter 2.service, long after desiccationist forest protection policies had emergedon the island colonies, was largely an internal and.indigenous matter,drawing heavily on Indian environmental knowledge and tree-plantingpractice, and the desiccationist ideas put into practice on St Vincent andSt Helena. 33 However, the influence of the Society of Arts remainedimportant for a while. For example, William Roxburgh, the secondsuperintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, promoted extensivetree-planting policies in Bengal with the active encouragement of theSocietyofArts." Indian forest conservation practice and environmental-ism after 1842 also drew on the climatic theories of Alexander vonHumboldt and Joseph Boussingault, as well as on the forestry methodsinspired by French physiocracy and its German physiocratic imitator 35Initially local colonial scientific societies in India provided theimpetus and professional authority necessary to establish the first forestconservation agencies in India to be based on desiccationist notions(specifically the Bombay Forest Department and the Madras ForestDepartmentl.l" In the early 1850s, however, the proponents of forestconservation on an all-India basis found it necessary, in the face ofstatereluctance to finance such an establishment, to resort once more to asource of metropolitan scientific authority, namely the British Associa-tion for the Advancement of Science. In 1851 the BAAScommissioneda full report on the 'physical and economic consequences' of tropicaldeforestation.V This helped to legitimate the theoretical and mental basis for the subsequent development of an 37 H..Cleghorn, F. Royle, R. Baird-Smith and R. Strachey, 'Report of the Committeeappointed by the British Association to consider the probable effects in an economicaland point of view of the destruction of tropical forests', Reportofthe BritishASSOCiatIOn fOr theAdvancement ofScience, 1852, pp. 78-102.38 J.S. Wilson, :C?n the and gradual desiccation of the earth and atmosphere',ReportoftheBritishASSOCiatIOn fOr theAdvancement ofScience (Transactions I 1858155-156. '.h ,pp.39 Newton (the originator and drafter of Britain's first bird protection legislation In 1868) and Wallace used their respective presidencies of sections of the BAAS asplatforms for propagandising their own conservationist agendas. Both menlinked global deforestation and desiccation with species extinctions.17 Evolution o/the Colonial Discourseadministration. Seven years later the BAAS became the forum fordiscussions on 'the general and gradual desiccation of the earth a d in the of a paper delivered byJ. Spotswood paper can be said to mark the onset of a truly internationalenvironmental debate in which processes operating at a global scalewerebeing considered.In the ensuing two decades the BAAS continued to serve as aforum for advocates of forest and species preservation, Professor AlfredNewton and Alfred Russell Wallace both utilised the BAASfor launch- their opinions and programmes and evoking discus-SIOns on exnncuon and deforestation.P? To some extent, however, the proved as an institutional setting for the airing ofenvironmentalist VIews, partly because it only met for a limited time,once a year, and partly because its influence in the colonial context wasrelatively,,:eak. As a result the Royal Geographical Society displaced the the 1860s, as the most prominent institutional setting forthe dISCUSSIOn of the desiccationist and conservationist discourses thatwere so much attention from botanists and policy-makers inthe colonies, At this period, it should be pointed out, the constructionof environmental agendas and local land use policies in the British in contrast to the French case, did not yet receive any backingor gUIdanceat all from governmental institutions at the centre. In otherwords, there was no imperial environmental 'centre of calculation'sponsored by the state in Britain itself (and this remained the case untilthe establishment ofthe Imperial ForestryInstitute at Oxford in 1924).40Ecology, Climate anti Empire 1640 To some extent the forestry school founded at Cambridge in 1904 could be seen as acentre of environmental calculation and was certainly responsible for much innovationin colonial forest policy. It was more autonomous in some respects than the later OxfordInstitute which replaced it in 1924. See Cambridge University Library Archives; files onthe Forestry school.41 For a period Indian foresters were trained at Nancy. See E. P. Stebbing, Theforests ofIndia (Edinburgh, 1922), vols 1 and 2.Instead any government centres of calculation were all situated at theimperial periphery, especially in Madras, Bombay, Port Louis, CapeTown and, more latterly, at Dehra Dun, the headquarters of the IndianForest Service and training schools.In France, on the other hand, the imperial forest school at Nancyhad served as a centre of environmental ideas and training, much of itdesiccationist in nature, since 1824.41The Royal Geographical Society,therefore, was effectively required to fulfil a centralising role and did soin avelYimportant sense, particularlywith respect to the transfer offorestconservation and desiccation ideas between India, where they hadbecome well established, and the rest of the British colonies, above allthose in Africa. In the course of being utilised in this way the RGSeffectively played a role in the globalisation of desiccation concepts andhence a major part in the diffusion of a particularly exclusionist andhegemonic forest conservation ideology. In the course of acquiring thisenvironmental role the RGS began to undergo a significant transition interms of its own raison d' etre and in terms of the influence which itexerted over the emerging agendas of academic geography.The publication ofCharles Darwin's Origin ofSpecies in 1859 hadset the scene for a decade of existential and religious crisis in which oldassumptions about birth and death, time and chronology, religion andgeneration, already much fractured, were finally broken. These anxietieswere mirrored, or coped with, [n an unprecedented wave ofenvironmen-tal concern throughout the 1860s. Thus the decade saw the foundationof the all-India forest department, the founding of the CommonsPreservation Society, the passing of the first British bird protectionlegislation and the publication ofG.P. Marsh's Man andNature and thepublication of0 r H ugh Cleghorn's Forests and Gardens ofSouthIndia.4219 Evolution o/the Colonial DiscourseEcology, Climate and EmpireProfessor AlfredNewton, pioneer conservationist. Newton linkedglobaldeforestation and desiccation tospecies extinctions.1842 There isnogeneral work as yetonthe'environmental decade' ofthe1860s. Separateworks onand fromtheperiod are LordEversley (George Shaw-Lefevre), Forests, commonsand ftotpaths (London, 1912); George Perkins Marsh, Man and nature: or physicalgeography astramftrmedbyhumanaction (NewYork, 1864); H. F. Cleghorn, TheftrestsandgarrkmofSouth India (Edinburgh, 1861). Foravery limited treatment, confined toBritain itself see J. Sheail, Naturein trust(London, 1976).43 Wilson, 'On thegeneral andgradual desiccation of theearth andatmosphere'.44 J.S. Wilson, 'On the progressing desiccation of the basin of the Orange river inSouthern Africa', Proceedings oftheRoyalGeographical Society, IX(1865), pp. 106-109. J.S. Wilson, 'On the increasing desiccation of inner Southern Africa', Report oftheBritish Associationftr theAdvancement ofScience (Transactions}, 1864, p. 150The main focus of academic geography soon reflected this shift in theemergence of 'evolutionary physical geography' -and in the birth of'denudation chronology' .Indeed the RGS Proceedings of2nd May 1869advertised Sopwith's geological models in wood, one ofwhich was called'Valleys of denudation'. And it was in the field of denudation anddesiccation that the RGS and early environmentalists such as HughCleghorn, John Croumbie Brown and George Bidie found much incommon.The intellectual ground had been well prepared by Livingstone'sreports of what he believed to be evidence of chronic and irreversibledesiccation in parts of the Kalahari and northern Bechuanaland. It wasthis data that first stimulated the writing in 1858 of a paper by J.Spotswood Wilson on 'the general and gradual desiccation of the earthand armosphere'r'" This is one the earliest papers on the 'greenhouse'effect and held out the stark promise of an early extinction ofhumanityas a result of atmospheric changes brought about by natural desiccationand augmented by the upheaval ofthe land, 'waste by irrigation', and thedestruction of forests. Wilson quoted liberally from the works ofLivingstone and other travellers, giving descriptions of desiccated land-scapes in Australia, Africa, Mexico and Peru, all ofwhich had 'formerlybeen inhabited by man', as Wilson put it. On March 13 1865 a paperremarkably similar in theme, especially in its references to SouthernAfrica and to Livingstone's writings, was given at the RGS.44 candy an earlier version of the paper had first been given at the B!iAS.45tOne may surmise that the fact that the same paper was then atthe RGS was due to the intervention of Colonel George Balfourbf the duel Edward Green Balfour, 'Notes of the influence exercised bytrees inIn UCIng ram and preservi . '.... J(1849) 4 ---4 rvIng mcrsrure, maaras Journal ofLiterature and Science, 25,pp. 02 48.47 W'l ' hI son, On t eprogressing desiccation'.21Evolution ofthe ColonialDiscourseIndian Army, a member of the RGS Council. George Balfour was a ofDr Edward Green Balfour, then deputy Inspector-General ofHospltals, Presidency (and later Surgeon-General ofIndia) andone ofthe and strongest advocates offorest protection in India.46At meetlllgs ofthe RGS in 1865 and 1866 Colonel Balfour spokeat s.ome on in forest conservation that were thentaking place III several different colonies. This display of his unrivalledknowledge no mere vanity. George Balfour dearly saw it as his taskto propagandise what he saw as the merits of forest protection instemming the threat of desiccation. By 1865 the terms ofa debateabout the causes of desiccation in the tropics had been set f rI I Wh'l . a morec ear y. . I e III 1858 it acceptable to attribute the processto (which David Livingstone favoured, for example, ) by March 1865 saw the appearance ofan entirely newInterpretation of global processes of degradation. Desiccation was notnatural, argued, 'but was entirely the consequence ofhuman action. WIlson felt that one could demonstrate this well in thcase Mrica. 'The human inhabitants (ofthe Orange river basin)are a prune cause ofthe disaster' he wrote, and' the natives have for agesbeen accustomed to burn the plains and to destroythe timber and ancientforests ...the more denuded of trees and brushwood d h idhid ,an t e more antea? the s,maller the supply ofwater from the atmosphere'. the eviladvances , went on apocalytically, 'in an increasing and, u.nless checked, must advance, and will end in the depopula-tron and entl:e :bandonmenr ofmany spots once thickly peopled, fertileand productive. 47 !. this warning with a global survey of locations inwhich changes had followed on deforestation. The lessons weredear, Wilson thought, wherein .own British colonies of Barbadoes, Jamaica, Penang, and theMaurItIUS, the fellingof forests has alsobeenattended b di .f '. . ya rrrununono ram. In the Island of Penang, the removal of the jungle from theEcology, Climate and Empire 2048 Ibid.49 Ibid.summits of hills by Chinese settlers speedilyoccasioned the springs todry up, and, except during the monsoons, no moisture was left in thedisforested districts. In the Mauritius it has beet;found necessary toretain all lands in the crests of hills and mountains in the hands ofgovernment to bedevotedto forest, the fertilityof thelowerlandshavingbeenfound byexperiencetodepend upon clothingthehillswith wood."Only draconian controls, it was implied, could stop a world-wideruination of the forests of the British colonies and indeed the entireeconomic demise of large areas of country. Wilson was especiallyconcerned with South Africa,it being a matter of notoriety ....that the removal piecemealof forests,and the burning off of jungle from the summits of hills has occasionedthe uplands to become dry and the lowlands to losetheir springs.......itbecomes of extreme importance to our South African fellow-subjects,that the destruction of the arboreal protectors of water should beI regarded as a thing to bedeplored, deprecated and prevented; and thatpublic opinion on the matter should be educated.....but we must notstop there. The evil is one of such magnitude and likely to bear soabundant a harvest of misery in the future, that the authority of law,whereverpracticable, should be invoked in order to institute preventivemeasures. Not only should fuel be economized, but the real interests ofthe British coloniesand Dutch republics. for many long years to come,wouldmost certainlyberepresented bythepassage ofstringentenactmentswhich should in the first place forbid, at any season or under circumstanceswhatsoever, the firing of grasson fieldor mountain. absolute necessity which exists for keeping as large a surface of ground aspossiblecoveredwithvegetation, in order toscreenit from thesolar rays, and thus to generate cold and humidity, that the radiationfrom the surface may not drive off the moisture of the rain-bearingclouds in their season, ought to compel the rigid enforcement ofsuch a 'legal provision. Those colonial acts on this subject which are already inexistence-for the Colonial Parliament at the Cape hasfound it necessaryto passrestrictivemeasures- arenot sufficientlystringent to be ofmuchservice, inasmuch as they are not entirely prohibitory, permitting theburning of the field at certain times of year.49The main discussants of Wilson's seminal paper at the March50 Clements Markham, 'On theeffects ofthedestruction offorests inthe western GhaursofIndiaonthewatersupply', Proceedings a/theRoyalGeographicalSociety, X (1866). pp.266-267.23 Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourse1865 RGS meetingwere, on the one side, Drs Livingstone and Kirk, whoboth contested social explanations of deforestation in favour of non-anthropogenic explanations of continental desiccation, which bothbelieved to be taking place in Africa. Ranged on the other side of theargument were Francis Galton, the secretary of the RGS, (and a cousinof Charles Darwin), Colonel George Balfour and Lord Stratford deRedcliffe. Sir RoderickMurchison, chairing the discussion, also declaredhimself in favour of the interpretations offered by Wilson and in favourofhis radical interventionist solutions. Livingstone, for hispart, pointedout that 'the author of the paper did not seem to know that many ofhissuggestions had already been adopted at the Cape, where immensequantities ofEucalypti were grown in the botanic garden for distributionamong those who wished to plant trees. In four years the trees grew to aheight of twenty feet.' Such exchanges of basic information serve toindicate the role which could be played by the RGS. However thediscussion following the Wilson paper also exposed, in a somewhatembarrassing fashion, the very slow nature of the diffusion of environ-mental information and ideas between colonies and, even more, betweencolonies and the imperial Centre.This was particularly apparent to George Balfour who, in succes-sive RGS debates, saw it as his duty to advertise the efforts made inparticular colonies, above all in India, Mauritius andTrinidad, to protectforest and thereby forestall c1irpatic change. Possibly as a result ofBalfour's lobbying two further given at the RGS, at meetings inJune 1866 and in March 1869, dealt very specifically with the issue ofstate responses to deforestation Iand desiccation. The paper given byClements Markham in 1866, ('On the effect ofthe destruction offorestsin the western Ghauts ofIndia on the water supply'), seems to have beenintended to demonstrate and publicise the contemporary efforts beingmade to control deforestation in upland India.l" The ensuing discussiontook on much the same format as that of1865, bringing together a wholevariety of self-confessed experts and travellers from several differentcolonies. Initiating the discussion of Markham's paper MurchisonEcology, Climate and Empire2224 Ecology, Climateand Empire Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourse 25commented that the subject ofthe destruction offorests 'was one ofverygreat interest to all physical geographers',51 Murchison added that it wasa subject upon which he had himselfmuch reflected in reference to othercountries, 'even our own country'. He was happy, he said, to see manygentlemen present connected with India; and he would, in the firstinstance, call upon Sir William Denison, late Governor of Madras, tomake some observations upon the subject.Under Denison's able administration, Murchison informed thegathering, some of those very forest protection operations had beenundertaken to which Mr Markham had alluded. A three-cornereddiscussion then followed which fiercely debated the culpability orotherwise ofthe 'native' for deforestation. Denison believed that Indians'cut down trees without hesitation, and no-one ever dreamt of plantinga tree unless it were a fruit tree'. George Balfour, reflecting the anti-establishment attitudes of his conservationist brother, Edward Balfour,countered that it was' the practice ofrich Hindoos to sinkwells and planttopes oftrees' .52 Another discussant, Mr J. Crawfurd, pronounced it hisopinion that 'the presence of immense forests had proved one of thegreatest obstacles to the early civilization of mankind' and made the'assertion that Java, free from forest, was 'incomparably superior to all theother islands of the Indian Archipelago'. Balfour's unusual advocacy ofthe significance ofindigenous knowledge reflected the beliefs ofthe firstgeneration of (East India Company) colonial conservationists in IfI,dia,in stark contrast to Denison's comments which typify the more harsh and counter-productive exclusionism of much Indian forest policy after 1865.53.?Sir Henry Rawlinson, in his contribution to the RGS debate,opined that 'it was a matter patent to every traveller, and it might be-adopted as a principle in physical geography, that the desiccation of acountry followed upon the disappearance of its forests'. It was this51 Report of discussion, Proceedings o/the RoyalGeographical Society, X (1866), pp. 267-269.52 Ibid., p. 26853 This is the later policy usefullycharacterised by R. Guha in 'Forestry and social protestin British Kumaon, 1893-1921', SubalternStudies, 4 (1985), pp. 54-101.realisation that the emerging discipline of physical geography could beenlisted in the cause of global forest protection that seems to havepersuaded the core ofthe Indian forest serviceestablishment to patronisethe meetings of the RGS in the late 1860s. Furthermore, in the absenceof any other imperial institution, at least in London, showing anysignificant interest in the pressing issue of colonial deforestation, theRGS provided a sympathetic oasis in what was otherwise an institutionaldesert. Thus it was that on 25thJanuary 1869 that Hugh Cleghorn, theInspector-General of the new Indian forest department, attended ameeting of the Society addressed by Dr George Bidie on the subject of'the effects offorest destruction in Coorg'.54Murchison claimed on thisoccasion that 'it was highly gratifying to geographers to see variousbranches ofnatural history combined in illustration ofa great subject inphysical geography'.Introducing Dr Cleghorn, Murchison suggested that 'we weremore indebted than to any other gentleman in reference to this impor-tant question'. 55 Deforestation could best be understood, Cleghornbelieved, in terms ofan analysis of the amount ofcapital being investedin forest areas, principally by British planters. The native population inth: :x'es tern Ghats, he pointed out, were almost universally of theop1010n that the climate was drier on account of the changes thatEuropeans were graduallyintroducing. The Madras Forest Department, ,:as a new one, initiate? only 13 years before. It was graduallylOcreaslOg 10 usefulness and it wils now receiving the official attentionthat it deserved. 56 :Attempts to prevent defor6tation in other colonies had, as late asthe 1860s, receivedvirtuallyno support from the imperial centre. Insteadimportant propaganda for conservation was being created at the periph-ery, not only in India but, in particular, in South Mrica. Thus some ofthe most strenuous extra-Indian efforts to promote forest protection and54 G. Bidie, 'On the effects of forest destruction in Coorg', Proceedings o/the RoyalGeographical Society, XIII (1869), pp. 74-80.55 Report of discussion, Proceedings ofthRoyalGeographicalSociety, XIII (1869), pp. 80-83.56 Ibid.26 Ecology, Climateand Empire Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourse 27tree-plantingand restrict grass-burninghad been made byJohn CroumbieBrown, a missionary and the Colonial Botanist ofthe Cape Colony from1862 to 1866. 57 However, local funding for these. pioneer efforts hadbeen removed, without protest from Whitehall, in' 1866 and a resentfulBrown had had to return to Scotland. 58 From there he proceeded topublish a stream ofworks on hydrology and forest conservation, manyof which soon came to the attention of the colonial authorities in theCape, Natal and elsewhere. The two most important ofthese works wereA Hydrology ofSouth Africa published in 1875 and Forests andMoisturepublished in 1877.59These works, far more influential on policy in thecolonial context than the writings ofG. P. Marsh, drew heavily on thedebates which had taken place atthe RGS during the 1860s, and derivedauthority from them. In Brown's books the discourse ofdesiccationismwas refined and made, in a sense, into an environmental article offaith.Furthermore his dicta on deforestation and climate were repeated anddeveloped throughout the colonial context duringthe ensuing40 years.60Brown's frequently expressed proposals for an Imperial School ofForestry (the idea itself was largely of his authorship) were ultimatelydeveloped at Cooper's Hill in Surrey and Dehra Dun in India andeventually in the form of the Imperial Forestry Institute at Oxford in1924, exactly a century, incidentally, after the foundation of the FrenchImperial Forestry school at Nancy/'! In the long interregnum betweenthe establishment of forest conservation in India and the establishmgnrof forestry training in Britain the RGS had acted as a highly { 57 See Chapter 3.58 R.H. Grove, 'Early themes in African conservation; the Cape in the nineteenthcentury', in D. Anderson and R.H. Grove, eds, Conservation inAfrica:peop/e, policiesandpractice (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 21-39.59 J.c. Brown, A hydrology ofSouthAfrica(Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1875); Forestsand moisture (Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1877).60 See W. Beinart, 'Soil erosion, conservationism and ideas about development; asouthern African exploration, 1900-1%0', Journal of Southern African Studies, 11(1984), pp. 52-83.61 Srebbing, ThefOrests ofIndia, vols 2 and 3. See also Ravi Rajan, 'Colonial science andimperial environmental history: the case offorestry in the British Empire'; chapter 1 of'Imperial environmentalism: the agendas and ideologiesof natural resourcemanagementin British colonial forestry, 1800-1950 (D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994).centre ofdebate and calculation and as a centre ofacademic authority ofgreat practical use to such fervent early environmentalists as JohnCroumbie Brown. Above all, the society had served to legitimate a notionofglobal environmental crisis, articulated in a desiccationist discourse ofremarkable political power, and the subject ofawide degree ofconsensus.Thewarnings against the' evil' consequences ofdeforestationwhichwereexpressed at the RGS in the 1860s were closely connected with anemerging contemporary consciousness of the possibility of extinctionwhich Darwin had sharplyfocussed in 1859.62Asense ofexistential crisisand sense of impending loss was translated, through the RGS, into ahighly empirical debate about deforestation and the possibilities ofintervention and environmental institution-building.The hegemonic prescriptions for colonial forest control which the consciousness stimulated and which the RGS encouraged can beinterpreted, perhaps, as a desire to re-assert control over a new existentialchaos and over environmental processes that might threaten the exist-ence ofhumanity itself. Prescriptions for forest conservation, for grass- prevention and for irrigation can be seen in this sense as redemptiveor.m.terms ofatonement. Brown had originally been a CongregationalistmiSSIOnary. He had found it logical and congenial to adapt the direwarnings of such desiccationists as Wilson and Bidie as a kind of gospel. His otherwise 'scientific' accounts are sprinkledwith references to Old Testament texts. The publication of The OriginofSpecies had simply helped to make the threat ofdesiccation more dire.Darwin made extinction a necfissary part of natural selection andevolution. This gave deforestatiod and desiccation a much strengthenedmeaning, necessitating human and conservationist intervention. Newscient!fic .theory not, however, immediately displace religiousmeanmg rn the environment. Desiccation continued to be associatedwith an expulsion from the Garden ofEden and with eviLIfsociety failedto make conservationist amends for the evilsofdeforestation, extinctionand ruin would follow. In the circumstances of this new thinking62. The background to this emerging consciousness of the possibility of extinctions is. discussed by Mario di Gregorio in 'Hugh Edwin Strickland (1811-1853) on Affinitiesand Analogies or, the case of the missing key', Ideas and Production, 7 (1987), pp. 35-50.28 Ecology, Climateand Empire Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourse 29colonial conservation acquired the overtones ofa kind ofredemptive andconfessional doctrine.PFor this purpose the evidence ofdesiccation needed, ofcourse, tobeglobal or cosmological, while its prescriptions n e ~ d e d to be universalist.It need hardly be said that practical policy prescriptions for counteractingdesiccation, principally through forest reservation and soil conservation,would turn out to be highly palatable to the agendas of colonial rule,particularlywhen it came to controlling the landscape, and manipulatinga 'chaotic' subject population. Those who attended the RGS debatesduring the 1860s probably did not fully appreciate that. Instead, placedat the centre ofsuch transitions, it is not surprising that geography itselfshouldsoon have been affected braredemptive cosmology. The redemp-tive element was reflected particularly in the new discipline of physicalgeography as it developed after 1870 and is best understood in thewritings ofArchibald Geikie. 'Evolutionary Geography', he wrote,traces howman alikeunconsciously and knowinglyhaschangedthefaceof nature........ it must be owned that man in most of his strugglewiththe world had fought blindly for his own immediate interests. Hiscontest, successful for the moment, has too often led to sure and saddisaster. Stripping forests from hill and mountain, he had gained hisimmediateobject in the possession of abundant suppliesof timber; buthe haslaidopen theslopestobe parchedbydrought or to besweptdownby rain. Countries once rich in beauty and plenteous in all that was;t".,needful for his support are now burnt or barren or almost denuded o ~ '1'1 "their soil.Graduallyhe had beentaught byhisownexperience that whil%his aimstill is to subdue earth he can attain it not by setting nature and?her laws at defiance but byenlistingthemin hisservice.........he haslearntat lastto beaministerand interpreterof nature andhe findsinher areadyand uncomplainingslave. 64The final lines ofGeikie's text indicate that, even while it assumedan environmentalist guise, geography continued to exhibit some of theattributes of a discourse ofdomination. However it was a discourse thatwas ultimately contradictory. Thus the efforts made by colonial conser-63 I discuss these issues at greater length in Chapter 2.M Archibald Geikie, 'On evolutionary geography', Journal of the Royal GeographicalSociety, 2 (1870), pp. 232-245.vationists and metropolitan geographers to understand the mechanismsofenvironmental degradation could hardly fail to touch on the uncom-fortable and dynamic connections between the kinds of economicdevelopment unleashed by imperial expansion and annexation and thealarming patterns of global environmental change that had becomeapparent to audiences at RGS debates after 1860. In the concluding partof this narrative I make a short survey of the way in which fears ofartificially-induced impacts on climate and environment developed intothe patterns ofpropaganda and environmental discourse with which weare so familiar today.After the 1860s desiccation and 'desertification' fears, incorpo-rated particularly into the forestry and land management policies oftheFrench and British colonial empires, continued to exert a sporadicallypowerful impact. It was an impact that was reinforced after extremeclimatic events and in periods ofrapid political change. The initial thrustto this policy in the British context was given by Sir Joseph Hooker, theDirector of Kew Gardens, when he pressed for a more systematicapplication of forest policies in a series of lectures published in 1872.65The environmental texts and propaganda ofparticular individuals werehighly influential in this story. Like those ofJohn Croumbie Brown andArchibald Geikie the new narratives of environmental alarmism werefrequently evangelical and even millennial in their tone. Their prescrip-tive ambitions held out the prom;se of increased status for scientists aswell as increased funding. Partlyas a result of this, desiccationisr andconservationist ideas, in which c0nsiderable claims were made for thevirtues of state land control, bedame a major feature of the technicalagendas of French and British! colonial rule, not least during theexpansionist phase of the late nineteenth century. This tendency wasmagnified as governments consolidated their rule in climatically mar-ginal areas that were highly vulnerable to droughts. Soon after thepublication ofJ. C. Brown's first two texts India, Southern Mrica andAustralia were all affected by droughts in 1877-1880 of an almostunprecedented severity, the result ofthe strongest EI Nifio episode since65 Reported inJ.D. Hooker, 'On theprotection offorests', JournalofAppliedScience, 1(1872), pp. 24-25. .66 Government ofIndia, Reports ofthefamine commission (4 vols, Calcutta, 1880).67 The Southern Oscillation is a recognised large-scale meteorological feature made.upof high-altitude air currents and jetstreams, connecting the climates of South Australia and the Indian Ocean. It is a geographically and seasonally oscillatingphenomenon dynamically connected with the timing and strength of ocean currentssuch as the El Nifio. Assuch it is fundamental to the timing ofperiodic droughts and toalterations in the strength of the monsoon.68 See Chapter 4.69 A. Moloney, Sketch oftheftrestry ofWestAfrica (London, and see OlufemiOmosini, 'Alfred Moloney and his strategies for development III Lagos colony andhinterland',journal oftheHistorical Society ofNigeria, 7 (1975), pp. 657-672.70 Perhaps the most famous of these was Charles Lane-Poole, eventually appointed1791-2. In India the droughts resulted in especiallyhigh mortality, andled to a wholesale re-examination of the evidence deforestation-rainfall links in the the reports of the Famine Commission of 1880.66This led in turn to a strengtheningand effective militarisingofthe powersof the forest department in India. It also stimulated the systematic .investigation of global teleconnections between climatic events thecolonial periphery, research that led eventually to an understanding ofthe Southern Oscillation and the mechanism of the monsoon'", Com-munications between Indian and Australian scientists were especiallyimportant in this respecr." Meanwhile, roving experts from the IndianForest Department travelled throughout the newly expanded BritishEmpire, reproducing the models of forest manage.ment that had beendeveloped in the previous 40 years in India. Indian precedents wereadopted in SouthernMrica (particularlyin Natal and the Cape), Central America, South-East Asia, Australia and elsewhere. Even Incoastal West Africa the desiccationist message began to diffuse, not leastin the work ofAlfred Moloney, the Governor of the Lagos Colony.f?By the late 1880s the typologies of anti-desiccation forest policyin the French and British colonial states were so closely inter-related that,theycan be said to have constituteda single rulingphilosophy rather thantwo separate traditions. French and British forestry jou.rnals were and imitative ofthe experiences oftheir rival services, while many Britishforesters were actually trained at the French Imperial at N 70French foresters were even employed directly by the British COlq,.lal

?Conservator ofAustralia; see Lane-Poole papers, Nancy HIes, MSS Collection, Austral-ian National Library, Canberra.71 TheAnglo-French BoundaryForest Commission was set up at the instance ofcolonialforest department officialsin the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast and Nigeria. It commencedan ambitious and partially successful programme of tree-planting, mainly of eucalypts,in the semi-arid Sub-Saharan zones on the northern boundaries ofAnglo-French WestAfrica. The onset ofthe Second World War brought it to an unfortunate and prematureend. For details see National Archives of Nigeria (Ibadan), Forest Department AFBFFiles.72 E.g., see Franklin B. Hough, On theduty ofgovernments in thepreservation offtrests(Salem, 1873), and Report uponforestry; from the committee appointedto memorialiseCongress ... regarding thepreservation offtrests (Salem, 1878).31Evolution ofthe Colonial Discourseservices; the employment of the Count Vasselot de Regne in the CapeConservancy in South Mrica being a notable example ofthis. Similarly, foresters were widely employed by both French andBritish colonial governments, above all in the higher echelons of theIndian Forest Service. In the colonial context this resulted in an intermix-ing ofGerman forest science methods and an Anglo-French tradition ofdesiccationism. The sheer vigour of the Anglo-French forest 'move-ment', as one might legitimately term it (which reached its apogee in theremarkable 1934 Anglo-French Boundary Forest Commission) beganeven to influence the very tardy development ofconservationism in theUnited States."! Thus Franklin Benjamin Hough, one-time director ofthe United States census (and a local historian and evangelical preacher),who was a keen student of colonial forestry methods as well as a closefriend ofJohn Croumbie Brown, wrote a series ofreports after 1873 thatled to the foundation of the United States Forest Service.72The years immediately prior to 1900 saw a renewed interestdeveloping in somewhat millennial theories of global desiccation. Sig-nificantly perhaps, these were preoccupied with regions that lay outsidethe areas ofAnglo-European and American colonial control. In particu-lar, they posed a post-glacial desiccation of the environments ofCentralAsia and China based on the twin tenets that wet conditions character-ised the glacial phases ofthe Pleistocene and that aridityhad increased inthe Holocene since the warming of the Pleistocene icesheets. Travellersin Central Asia pointed to the occurrence ofdry water courses and lakesEcology, Climate and Empire3032 Ecology, Climate and Empire Evolution ofthe ColonialDiscourse33and abandoned settlements as evidence ofthis desiccation and suggestedthat deteriorating environmental conditions had spurred successivenomadic invasions of their more civilised neighbours during periods ofincreased aridity." The work of Kropotkin (1904) and EllsworthHuntington (1907) are conspicuous examples here.74However, like theworkofG.P. Marsh, the ideasofAmerica ns suchasHuntington had onlya limited effect in the European colonial context. Similarly, TheodoreRoosevelt's famous Conservation Conferences exerted, at first, only alimited effect outside North America, even though Roosevelt's mainadvisers, and speech-writers, Gifford Pinchot andWilliam McGee, werewell informed themselves about Anglo-French colonial forest conserva-tion initiatives, and admired them."Moreover these progressivist American initiatives were made atprecisely the periodwhen Britishcolonial administrations in WestAfricawere encountering formidable and effective indigenous opposition tothe imposition oftheir own surprisingly enlightened forest policies fromchiefs and other interests in the Gold Coast and Nigeria." This was aproblem that, in general, was not encountered at this stage by the Frenchin West Africa; although German forest administrations in Tanganyika Togo found it necessary to implement their forest regulationsthrough the use of draconian punishments." In the Gold Coast andNigeria colonial governments were forced to abandon their Indian-derived forest management programmes entirely, only replacing th. This doesnot seem an extraordinary thesis to advance, particularly because theevidence seems to indicate that the penetration of western economicforces (not all necessarily synonymous with colonialism) did indeedpromote a rapid ecological transformation in some instances,6 which wasespecially true in the early nineteenth century in India and SouthernMrica.7 On closer inspection, however, the hypothesis of a purelydestructive environmental imperialism constituting a complete breakwith the pre-colonial past does not stand up well at all. Indeed this notionapparently arose out of a misunderstanding about the contradictory,heterogeneous, and ambivalent nature of the colonial state's workings.Above all, anumber ofscholars have been generally unaware ofthe extentto which colonial governments were peculiarly open to the pressures ofa contemporary environmental lobby during the first half of the nine-teenth century, a time ofgreat uncertainry about the role and long-termsecuriry of the colonial state. Thus, although it undoubtedly promotedwidespread ecological destruction, colonial enterprise also helped tocreate a context conducive to analytical thinking about theprocesses of ecological change to the formation of a conservationideology.sEcology) Climate and Empire 3840 Ecology, Climate andEmpire Conserving Eden 41Ironically, too, the colonial state in its pioneer-ing conservationistrole provided a forum for controls on the unhindered operations ofcapital for short-term gain which, it might be .argued, constituted afundamental contradiction to what is normally supposed to have madeup the commoncurrencyofimperial expansion and profit maximisation."Moreover, the absolutist nature of colonial rule made it possible tointroduce interventionist forms of land management that would havebeen very difficult to impose in Europe, even though many of themprovoked active indigenous resistance. Colonial expansion also pro-moted the rapid diffusion of new scientific ideas and environmentalconcepts among colonies and between metropole and colonyover a largearea of the world. Such ideas sometimes acquired a potent momentumof their own independent of the apparatus of colonial rule while stillexerting influence on its actors.Conservation in its more modern sense has often been perceivedas a phenomenonwith antecedents in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-centuryNorthAmerica. 10This interpretation regards HenryD. Thoreau,John Muir, and George Perkins Marsh as the leading originators ofmodern environmentalism. In contrast, scholars dismiss colonial conser-vation and forestry regulation, especially in India, as mere disguiseslegitimised by a subordinate colonial science for resource exploitationand land seizure by the state. II Although some elements of truth in suchdoctrinaire accounts are normally coupled with doubtful notions colonial Golden Ages of ecological balance, they have all overlook the remarkably innovative nature of early colonial conse*a- r9 For a useful analogous discussion ofcolonial state hostility to capital interests, see D.Washbrook, 'Law, state and agrarian societyin colonial India' ,ModernAsianStudies, 15(1981), pp. 648-721.10 E.g., Worster, Nature'seconomy; S. Hays, Conservation and thegospel ofefficiency: theProgressive ConseruationMouement, 1880-1920(Cambridge, Mass., 1959); D. Lowenthal,George PerkinsMarsh. versatile Vermonter (New York, 1958).II See especiallyR. Guha, The unquiet woods: ecological change andpeasant resistance inthe Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), and M. Gadgil, 'Towards anecologicalhistory ofIndia', EconomicandPoliticalWeekly, XX(1985), 1909-18. Similarinterpretations appear in V. Shiva, 'Afforestation in India: problems and strategies',Ambia, 14 (1985), pp. 21-41; andM. Gadgil, Deforestation:problemsandprospects(NewDelhi: Society for Promotion of Woodlands Development, 1989).tionism, the characteristics ofwhich have been very much neglected untilrecently. Theyalso tend to underplay the highly developed trend towardsexclusionist forms ofstate forest control developed in pre-colonial statesin South Asia, as well as the well-established history of rapid, and oftenstate-sponsored, deforestation in the centuries before the onset of EastIndia Company rule in the sub-continent. 12As a result the notion ofNorthAmerican primacy in conservationthinking has remained unquestioned. In fact, a good deal of evidenceindicates that complex notions ofstate intervention in natural resourceprotection, many of them strongly connected with new and highlyanthropomorphic valuations of the environment, emerged and wereextensively promulgated in the colonial context more than a centurybefore George Perkins Marsh published his famous Man andNaturein1864,t3 What is more, Marsh apparently drew much of his inspirationfrom a detailed know