By Mart A. Stewart (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) “"What Nature Suffers to Groe" explores the mutually transforming relationship between environment and human culture on the Georgia coastal plain between 1680 and 1920. Each of the successive communities on the coast-the philanthropic and imperialistic experiment of the Georgia Trustees, the plantation culture of rice and sea island cotton … Continued
By T. H. Breen (NHC Fellow, 1983–84; 1995–96) The great Tidewater planters of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were fathers of the American Revolution. Perhaps first and foremost, they were also anxious tobacco farmers, harried by a demanding planting cycle, trans-Atlantic shipping risks, and their uneasy relations with English agents. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries lived … Continued
Edited by Joan Thirsk (NHC Fellow, 1986–87) Chapters from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, volumes IV and V part II, now appear for the first time in five paperback volumes, designed primarily for a student readership. Dealing respectively with pieces, wages, profits and rents; estate management and the condition of the farm labourer; … Continued
By Bozhong Li (NHC Fellow, 1992–93) For centuries the Yangzi delta has acted as the locomotive of China's economic growth. This book examines the surprising phenomenon of a long period of economic growth from 1620 to 1850 in the traditional agriculture of this extremely densely populated area, when no new land was available and no … Continued
By Joan Thirsk (NHC Fellow, 1986–87) People like to believe in a past golden age of "traditional" English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. Yet crops from the past like flax, hemp, rapeseed, and woad are gradually reappearing in the "modern" countryside. Thirsk reveals how the forces … Continued
By David Gilmartin (NHC Fellow, 2001–02; 2017–18) The Indus basin was once an arid pastoral watershed, but by the second half of the twentieth century, it had become one of the world’s most heavily irrigated and populated river basins. Launched under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century, this irrigation project spurred political, social, and … Continued
By Parker Shipton (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) Parker Shipton brings a variety of perspectives—cultural, economic, political, and religious-philosophical—and years of field experience to this fascinating study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa. His conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom of the past half century (including perennial World Bank orthodoxy) about the need … Continued
Slave labor differed according to period and location. In the 1700s plantation owners tried to maintain self-sufficiency based on the varied skills of their slaves. A slave’s skill level and value to the master often determined how he/she was treated. Lock-step, highly supervised gang labor, replaced traditional patterns of individual work. Race may have influenced … Continued
Environmentally, “suburbs” are marriages of city and countryside. Only in the twentieth century did such places acquire such geographic and cultural centrality in Americans’ lives, to become where most of us live, shop, and work. Not surprisingly, they also had seminal impacts on our modern notions of “nature” and “environment.” If the overlaps between America’s … Continued
In the summer of 1962 the prestigious New Yorker magazine published excerpts from a sensational new book by Rachel Carson. In Silent Spring Carson argued that humankind was fatally tampering with nature by its reckless misuse of chemical pesticides, particularly the ubiquitous new wonder chemical DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane). In riveting chapters on the contamination of soil, … Continued