Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900 by Sumit Guha;

Author:Sumit Guha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

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South Asia was long thought to be a land of territorially fixed, autonomous villages. This chapter has demonstrated that the village was the result of a complex historical interaction of states, communities, and ecosystems. But people and land can be recalcitrant, so governments often failed to achieve the transparency they desired. The chapter has additionally explored alternative lifeways pursued through and around the same lands as well as the importance of untilled lands, spontaneous tree growth, and wild foods in everyday life. Finally, it has included those transients and nomads who did not fit in the village frame. Their circuits, however, intersected in time and space with many villages in ways that were both symbiotic with and predatory upon peasant farming. Empires and kingdoms, domains and fiefs all ultimately depended on the extraction of many different resources from the many anthropogenic environments of Asia. It took the skill and toil of millions of peasants, herdsmen and foragers, and artisans and traders to produce those resources. Their production required all of them to each develop unconscious resource maps that told them where unused dung might be collected, where wild tubers could be found, which barks yielded dyes and which were medicinal, which trees were in fruit, and when or where to cut the long axle of a peasant cart. But production possibilities varied by time and season across the many ecological zones of the subcontinent. They also varied depending on the range of and fluctuation in political authority. Governments in South Asia have been called “soft states.” But they were far from universally emollient with all; rather, they were soft with the hard and hard with the soft. These encounters were repeated through centuries. The next chapter considers the effects of conflict upon the environment at a regional and village scale.

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