A01=John F. Richards
age of exploration
Author_John F. Richards
case studies
Category=NH
china
commercial hunting
conquest
deforestation
early modern period
england
environmental change
environmental history
environmental impact
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
frontier life
fur trade
global history
global perspective
historical processes
human impact
imperialism
japan
natural environment
natural historians
natural history
natural world
north america
reshaping landscapes
russia
settlement frontiers
wetland ecology
Product details
- ISBN 9780520246782
- Weight: 1043g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Jan 2006
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reach - and their numbers - as 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 Frontier" offers 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 Frontier" considers 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 humans - whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes - altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.
John F. Richards is Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of The Mughal Empire (1993) and Mughal Administration in Golconda (1975) and the editor of Land, Property and the Environment (2001). He is coeditor of World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (1988) and Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (1983).
