Environmental history

This article looks at the environmental history of the empire by looking at histories of environmental change in the tropics by pioneering colonial scientists and by contemporary historians who are carving out the domain of colonial environmental history. The article argues that the development of an environmental sensibility can be traced to the encounter of seventeenth and eighteenth century Western Europeans especially naturalists, medical officers and administrators with the startlingly unfamiliar environments of the tropics and with the damage done to these environments by them.