Making Places and Making States

Kathleen Morrison

Chapter 4 in A History of Natural Resources in Asia, 2007, pp 81-99 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The environmental dimensions of South Asian history have attracted a great deal of attention in the last decade or so, with the result that we now have a greatly improved understanding of, for example, the ecological as well as social and political consequences of European colonialism and the continuing impact of differential power relations on both people and local landscapes. Not only has this scholarship been useful for putting contemporary resource struggles and ecological crises in broader perspective, but also has added to our understandings of the relations between local environmental conditions and both local and supralocal politics and economics. Building on these insights, I focus here on the connections between the very local constitution (or making) of places, culturally meaningful locales, and the establishment and maintenance of larger political-economic orders, what we may call making states. At both local and larger scales, ideas about what natural resources are, as well as the specifics of their exploitation, create conditions of possibility for social and political orders. At the same time, local landscapes may be radically altered by the demands of states; over the long term, these complex and imbricated relationships create novel environmental conditions that continue to affect human livelihoods into the present.

Keywords: Sixteenth Century; Environmental History; Fire History; Middle Period; Quaternary Science Review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-60753-8_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230607538

DOI: 10.1057/9780230607538_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().