The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World

"Yes, Richards’ book is at least as global as Crosby’s. It deals with a 300- to 350-year period. So again, part of my admiration for it is the size of the canvas on which he paints. Secondly, it provides both a kaleidoscopic and encyclopaedic sense of the scale of environmental change going on in the world in the pre-industrial period. It’s easy for us to imagine that strong and disruptive environmental changes are mainly a consequence of industrialisation, and there is some underlying truth to that. But Richards helps us understand that even before steam engines, humankind was capable of powerful and enduring alterations, species extinctions that will last for the eternity of time, and broad-scale deforestation. So that’s another merit of the book, to underscore the scale of environmental change in pre-industrial time. On top of that, it takes seriously parts of the world that are underrepresented in environmental history. He pays significant attention to East Asia, South Asia, the Ottoman lands, which—when he wrote this—was not novel, but rare. Now, twenty years later, there’s a huge library of environmental history on almost every part of the world, but that was not the case when he wrote this book at the turn of the century. It’s the longest book on my roster, probably twice the length of anything else. This is not a casual read, and not one that has had resonance outside of professional historians and hapless graduate students on whom it is imposed. They often admire it, but don’t love it the way they might love Kate Brown, Jeffrey Bolster, or Alfred Crosby. Exactly. I would agree with that in respect to the kind of environmental history that focuses on environmental change. Because the written sources for earlier periods, before—say—fifty years ago, were rarely attuned to this. Authors writing chronicles 100 or 500 years ago were usually not much interested in environmental change and weren’t that interested in the environment generally, although there are lots of minor exceptions. One of the things that environmental historians do is turn to non-textual sources, getting help from archaeology and all the paleo-sciences. Palynology, the study of fossil pollen, for example, and the various proxy records that are used to reconstruct past climate, such as , ice cores, speleothems. So, yes, environmental historians are unusually attuned to what they sometimes call ‘bio-archives’ and ‘geo-archives’ in addition to conventional paper archives. That said, cultural and intellectual environmental history—the study of what people have thought and written, does not suffer from a source problem. The sources are exactly those things that people have already written. They’re easy to find. Maybe not that easy to analyze, but they are almost all published and many of them free online. It’s an interdisciplinary approach and to work as an environmental historian it helps to be comfortable with reading scientific papers. I speak about this all the time with students and other historians; what I emphasize is that all that is required is being unafraid. You may not understand everything, I certainly don’t understand everything. When it comes to the work of geneticists, which I have to consult too often, if I understand 10% of what they are saying it’s a good day. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But think of it this way: when you are doing archival research, poring through old papers, 95% of what you read is useless to you. Not because you can’t understand it, but because it’s irrelevant to your own quest. So we are always looking for needles in haystacks of one sort or another. I’ll say one more thing about this. Many historians, including me, often read in foreign languages that we don’t know as well as we should. That’s analogous to reading the works of paleontologists or geneticists who are writing in scientific argot. When I read something in Turkish, it’s approximately the same as when I’m reading the work of a geneticist. If I get 10% of it, that’s as much as I can expect."