| Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 Contributor(s): Anker, Peder (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: 0674005953 ISBN-13: 9780674005952 Publisher: Harvard University Press OUR PRICE: $99.00 Product Type: Hardcover Published: January 2002 Annotation: Aelian's Historical Miscellany is a pleasurable example of light reading for Romans of the early third century. Offering engaging anecdotes about historical figures, retellings of legendary events, and descriptive pieces - in sum: amusement, information, and variety - Aelian's collection of nuggets and narratives could be enjoyed by a wide reading public. A rather similar book had been published in Latin in the previous century by Aulus Gellius; Aelian is a late, perhaps the last, representative of what had been a very popular genre. Here then are anecdotes about the famous Greek philosophers, poets, historians, and playwrights; myths instructively retold; moralizing tales about heroes and rulers, athletes and wise men; reports about styles in dress, foods and drink, lovers, gift-giving practices, entertainments, religious beliefs and death customs; and comments on Greek painting. Some of the information is not preserved in any other source. Underlying it all are Aelian's Stoic ideals as well as this Roman's great admiration for the culture of the Greeks (whose language he borrowed for his writings). |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Science | History - Science | Life Sciences - Ecology - Social Science | Human Geography |
| Dewey: 304.209 |
| LCCN: 2001039407 |
| Physical Information: 1.37" H x 6.61" W x 9.59" (1.55 lbs) 352 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 1900-1949 |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: From 1895 to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Peder Anker asks why ecology expanded so rapidly and how a handful of influential scientists and politicians established a tripartite ecology of nature, knowledge, and society. Patrons in the northern and southern extremes of the Empire, he argues, urgently needed tools for understanding environmental history as well as human relations to nature and society in order to set policies for the management of natural resources and to effect social control of natives and white settlement. Holists such as Jan Christian Smuts and mechanists such as Arthur George Tansley vied for the right to control and carry out ecological research throughout the British Empire and to lay a foundation of economic and social policy that extended from Spitsbergen to Cape Town. The enlargement of the field from botany to human ecology required a broader methodological base, and ecologists drew especially on psychology and economy. They incorporated those methodologies and created a new ecological order for environmental, economic, and social management of the Empire. |
