Social History and African Environments

The recent explosion of interest in African environmental history has resulted in a rich new literature.

This collection focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of the field, revealing the importance of standing back from today's controversies over the state of the African environment, to explore the historical contexts in which knowledge and ideas about nature, conservation and landscape were formed.

It brings together essays on relations between the environmental ideas and practices of Africans, colonial officials, settlers and scientists, challenging some of the interpretive conventions of Africanist scholarship.