African History and Environmental History

bibliographic database
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Periodical article

Title:	African History and Environmental History
Author:	Beinart, William
Year:	2000
Periodical:	African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:	99
Issue:	395
Period:	April
Pages:	269-302
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Africa
Subjects:	environmental history history History and Exploration Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/723810
Abstract:	Historians and social scientists have often been uneasy about incorporating environmental questions into their work. However, a new environmental history has emerged that has in certain respects run in parallel with trends in African history because it shares many well-established Africanist moral concerns; an essentially corrective and anticolonial approach which emphasizes African initiative in the face of European conquest and capitalist exploitation. At the same time, focus on environmental questions has extended the range of African studies. The author first reviews a number of interlinked lines of analysis in recent African environmental history that bear import for understanding the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Then he discusses African history and the issue of responsibility, the need to turn to a longer history and examine the relationship between African power and environmental transformation, the need to pay more attention to the history of science and knowledge, and to the history of African ideas in relation to the environment. Notes, ref.