Overview

Modern Forests is an environmental, institutional, and cultural history of forestry in colonial eastern India. By carefully examining the influence of regional political formations and biogeographic processes on land and forest management, this book offers an analysis of the interrelated social and biophysical factors that influenced landscape change. Through a cultural analysis of powerful landscape representations, Modern Forests reveals the contention, debates, and uncertainty that persisted for two hundred years of colonial rule as forests were identified, classified, and brought under different regimes of control and were transformed to serve a variety of imperial and local interests.

Full Product Details

9780804745567

Table of Contents

Reviews

The book is at its best when it examines the interplay of forces at the local level in two relatively contrasting regions - the wooded plains of southwest Bengal and the Himalayan foothills in north Bengal, and also in showing how the gathering of intelligence by Christian missionaries, administrators, military personnel, traders traveling in pursuit of valuable commodities such as precious stones, and scholars helped the British in becoming dominant in this interplay. Modern Forests is arresting when it unfolds the colonial scenario that led to the creation of state-owned forests....The book also gives an insight to how management techniques, developed in the temperate forests of industrial Europe, were transplanted to tropical forests of a predominantly agricultural society. - International Forestry Review

Author Information

K. Sivaramakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available