Book Review : Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies

Christina Folke Ax, Neils Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen and Karen Oslund (Eds.), Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2011, p. 337, price not mentioned.

The book under review is a fresh new attempt to consider the environmental legacies of colonialism, and its uniqueness lies in the fact that it adopts a cross-regional and comparative perspective, allowing the reader to appreciate the diversity of views on the subject. The book indeed spans an impressive numberof formerly colonised territories, including German, American, Portuguese, French, and British colonies in Asia and Africa. It also deals not only with the colonial period, but also has an entire section on the legacies of colonialism. The themes dealt with are equally diverse, which is perhaps also the weakness of the volume, as there is little to bind the essays together, apart from their broadly environmental paradigm.