The great European colonial empires were not just political and economic projects — they were ecological ones. Colonisers moved plants, animals, pathogens, and agricultural systems across oceans, transforming ecosystems on multiple continents simultaneously. Entangled Empires is a scholarly anthology that traces these ecological entanglements: how natural history, botanical gardens, agricultural transfer, and environmental exploitation shaped both the colonisers and the colonised.
The Ecology of Empire
The essays collected here span the Atlantic world, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Pacific, examining how colonial powers used natural knowledge as an instrument of control. Royal botanic gardens — Kew in London, the Jardin des Plantes in Paris — were not simply scientific institutions; they were nodes in networks for the extraction and redistribution of economically valuable plants. Rubber from Brazil became rubber plantations in Malaysia; cinchona (the source of quinine) from Peru became imperial medicine in India; sugar from the Caribbean remade entire landscapes and human populations.
The environmental history perspective offers something that political and economic history cannot: an account of what actually happened to the land. Colonial agriculture typically converted complex, multilayered ecosystems into monocultures — depleting soils, disrupting water cycles, and eliminating the biodiversity that had maintained ecological stability over millennia.
What Makes This Valuable
The anthology format means uneven quality — some essays are written for specialists and presuppose knowledge of the historical context. But the best chapters are models of environmental history: they show how the material world of plants, soils, and water was not a passive backdrop to human history but an active participant, resisting, adapting to, and being transformed by colonial projects in ways that shaped political outcomes.
The chapter on the Columbian Exchange — the transfer of species between Old and New Worlds that followed Columbus — is particularly illuminating. The arrival of diseases to which American populations had no immunity, the spread of European grasses that followed cattle, the adoption of American crops (potato, maize, tomato) that transformed European agriculture: these ecological entanglements changed the demographic and political history of the world.
Empire moved not just armies and commodities but soils and species and pathogens. The ecological ledger of colonialism has barely begun to be tallied.
— Entangled Empires, editorial introduction
6 Key Ideas From This Book
Royal botanic gardens served as relay stations for economically valuable plants — testing their cultivation in colonial climates before transferring them to large-scale plantation agriculture. They were sites of both scientific knowledge production and economic extraction, inseparable from the colonial projects they served.
The large-scale monoculture plantation — cotton, sugar, rubber, tobacco — was a colonial invention, optimised for export markets rather than local food security. The ecological fragility of monoculture, the dependence on chemical inputs, and the social structures that sustain it all trace back to this colonial template.
The post-1492 transfer of species between continents was the largest ecological disruption in human history. Introduced grasses displaced native species; introduced livestock transformed landscapes; introduced diseases collapsed human populations; introduced crops enabled population explosions elsewhere. The current global flora is a colonial artifact.
European naturalists frequently appropriated indigenous knowledge of plants and their uses without attribution or compensation — a practice that the anthology terms "biopiracy" avant la lettre. The economic value of quinine, rubber, and numerous food crops depended on indigenous knowledge that colonial science claimed to have "discovered."
Several essays argue that the ecological transformation of colonised territories — clearing forests, draining wetlands, imposing grid agriculture — served political as well as economic purposes. Landscape modification made colonised peoples more legible and controllable, and destroyed the ecological resources that had supported their independence.
The global food system's dependence on a small number of crop species, its reliance on monoculture, its patterns of land ownership and labour, and its disconnection of food production from local ecological knowledge all trace back to the colonial period. Understanding current agricultural problems requires understanding their historical roots.
Any Weaknesses?
This is an academic anthology, and it reads like one. Some chapters are dense with historiographical debate that will exhaust readers without specialist background. The editorial introduction does useful work contextualising the essays, but the book rewards selective reading rather than cover-to-cover consumption.
The geographic coverage, while broad, is not comprehensive — South and East Asia receive less attention than the Atlantic world, and Africa’s environmental history receives limited treatment.
Readers who want to understand how contemporary agricultural and ecological problems connect to colonial history — the deep roots of monoculture, soil depletion, and the loss of traditional ecological knowledge.
The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry for a complementary critique of industrial agriculture, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer for the Indigenous perspective on the ecological knowledge that colonialism disrupted.
Food system reformers and regenerative agriculture advocates who want the historical context for the problems they are trying to solve. Understanding how monoculture became dominant explains why dismantling it is harder than it looks.
Dense academic prose in several chapters. Come with patience and skip liberally; the best essays are well worth finding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Entangled Empires worth reading?
Not easy reading, but Entangled Empires offers something that more accessible books cannot: a genuinely historical account of how global ecological degradation happened, and why certain patterns of land use became entrenched. Essential context for anyone working on food systems or environmental restoration.
Who should read Entangled Empires?
Readers who want to understand how contemporary agricultural and ecological problems connect to colonial history — the deep roots of monoculture, soil depletion, and the loss of traditional ecological knowledge.
What is Entangled Empires about in one sentence?
The great European colonial empires were not just political and economic projects — they were ecological ones.
The Verdict
Not easy reading, but Entangled Empires offers something that more accessible books cannot: a genuinely historical account of how global ecological degradation happened, and why certain patterns of land use became entrenched. Essential context for anyone working on food systems or environmental restoration.
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