Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India

Modern Forests combines perspectives from environmental history, political anthropology, science studies, and cultural geography to evaluate transformations in Bengal forest use and management in the light of colonial practices, imaginations, and institutions. It describes conflicts over conservation, development, and governance in different bio-georaphic regions and argues that key variations emerged in patterns of land management that reflected the operation of regional ecological, social, and political processes across Bengal. It also demonstrates that Bengal, a much researched region, continues to offer immense possibilities for the study of agrarian landscapes. Studying regional processes can facilitate a dynamic analysis of state and social formations in all their complexity, while avoiding teleological accounts of environmental decline and land-use change. It enables an understanding of how various institutional cultures of colonial governance combined with patterns of environmental change to shape forestry development in India. By bringing ecological variations into environmental history, and by examining the interface between natural conditions and different political regimes, this work importantly enriches the field of environmental history.