The Unending Frontier An Environmental History of the Early Modern World [Paperback]

It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reachand their numbersas never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history,The Unending Frontieroffers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period.

John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity.The Unending Frontierconsiders each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humanswhether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapesaltered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.

John F. Richardsis Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author ofThe Mughal Empire(1993) andMughal Administration in Golconda(1975) and the editor ofLand, Property and the Environment(2001). He is coeditor ofWorld Deforestation in the Twentieth Century(1988) andGlobal Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy(1983).

List of Maps
List of Tables
Preface
Introduction

Part I. The Global Context
1. The Early Modern World
2. Climate and Early Modern World Environmental History

Part II. Eurasia and Africa
3. Pioneer Settlement on TlӢ