The nationalization of nature

Journal of American History

Volumn 86, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 976-986

  White, Richard ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0037576924     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2568602     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986), 133-308;
2. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), 199-274;
3. John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore, 1977).
4. The use of a national scale is as common among ecologists as among historians. See, for example, Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of Environmental Change in Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present (New York, 1994). Despite the title, the book covers two sections of the United States, the Northeast and the Midwest.
5. When I call early modern environmental histories transnational, I am implicitly asserting the ultimate centrality of the state, something that was not true during the early modern era itself. It is impossible to have many literal transnational histories of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries because nation-states then covered only a small portion of the globe.
6. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York, 1989), 4-5, 11-16;
7. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991).
8. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), esp. 28-31;
9. Soja, Postmodern Geographies;
10. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass., 1996);
11. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
12. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 93.
13. As useful as Lefebvre's ideas are for historians, there is an aspect of them particularly troubling for environmental historians. Scale involves space, and space is a relation between things, but there seems little place for nature within Lefebvre's conception of space. Without nature, there is no environmental history. Lefebvre makes space so thoroughly a human production that nature gradually disappears: nature is dying and awaits only "ultimate voidance." At times he reduces nature to an impossibly independent abstraction separate from human beings, human bodies, and their works that can, by definition, only die once social production begins. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 31, 82-83.
14. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 1-10, 25.
15. For an argument that French traditions were reworked in the nineteenth century to forge a connection with the modern state, see Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (3 vols., New York, 1996-1998), II, xii.
16. The best discussion of the relation between the national and the local in public memory and history is John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992), 14-77.
17. Richard White, '"Far West. See also frontier': The 'New Western History,' Textbooks, and the U.S. History Survey Course," AHA Perspectives, 30 (Sept. 1992), 1-12.
18. See, for example, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979), 3-8;
19. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 19-20, 75-79, 165-70.
20. George M. Fredrickson, "From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History," Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 587-604;
21. Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031-55;
22. Raymond Grew, "The Comparative Weakness of American History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 16 (Summer 1985), 87-101.
23. See also Michael McGerr, "The Price of the 'New Transnational History,'" American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1056-67.
24. Fredrickson, "From Exceptionalism to Variability," 590.
25. Fredrickson, "From Exceptionalism to Variability," Ibid., 598-600.
26. Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism," 1038-53.
27. McGerr, "Price of the 'New Transnational History'"; "Ian Tyrrell Responds," American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1068-72;
28. Ian Tyrrell, "Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire," Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1015-44.
29. See, for example, Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991).
30. J. H. Elliott, "Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World," in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, 1987), 3.
31. Elliott, "Introduction," 3-6.
32. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997);
33. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993);
34. Bailyn and Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm.
35. Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (Berkeley, 1999);
36. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism;
37. Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, 1972).
38. New York Times, July 21, 1997, pp. A3, A8, A10;
39. New York Times, ibid., July 22, 1997, p. A3;
40. Seattle Times, July 24, 1997, p. A1.
41. New York Times, July 22, 1997, p. A6;
42. Seattle Times, July 21, 1997, pp. A1, B1.
43. On rain forests, see Candace Slater, "Amazonia as Edenic Narrative," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1996), 114-31.
44. On biodiversity, see William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," " in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ibid., 81-82.
45. Kenneth Cmiel, "The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States," Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1231-50.
46. New York Times, July 21, 1997, p. A3.
47. Seattle Times, July 24, 1997, p. A1.
48. Seattle Times, Ibid., p. A21.
49. Seattle Times, Ibid., pp. A1, A21.
50. Donna R. Gabaccia, "Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History" Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1115-34.