Trading Environments: Frontiers, Commercial Knowledge and Environmental Transformation, 1750-1990 (Routledge Studies in Environment, Culture, and Society) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1138933449 ISBN 13: 9781138933446

Publisher: Routledge, 2015

Synopsis

This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? It considers cases from northern Europe, North and South America, Central Africa and New Zealand in the period between 1750 and 1990, and the contributors reflect on the effects of transnational commodity chains, competing economic knowledge systems, environmental ignorance and learning, and resource exploitation. In each case they identify tensions, blind spots, and environmental learning that plagued commercial projects on frontiers.

About this title

About the Author

Gordon M. Winder is Professor of Economic Geography and an Affiliated Professor at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU-Munich.

Andreas Dix is Professor for Historical Geography, Institute of Geography, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138933449
• ISBN 13: 9781138933446
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330
• Editor: Winder Gordon M., Dix Andreas