Western exploitation of other peoples is inseparable from attitudes and practices relating to other species and the extra-human environment generally. Colonial depredations turn on such terms as human, savage, civilised, natural, progressive, and on the legitimacies governing apprehension and control of space and landscape. Environmental impacts were reinforced, in patterns of unequal exchange, by the transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout the European empires, instigating widespread ecosystem change under unequal power regimes (a harbinger of today's globalization).This book considers these imperial exchanges and charts some contemporary legacies of those inequitable imports and exports, transportations and transmutations.
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