British Scholar: Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism
Gregory Allen Barton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 272 Pages

Reviewed by: Brett Bennett, University of Texas at Austin

Gregory Barton’s Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism challenges many assumptions in the
field and provides a new lens to view the origins of conservation and environmentalism. His conclusions raise
far-reaching questions for students of environmental and imperial history. What do the imperial origins of
environmentalism tell us about imperialism? What does the development of empire forestry tell us about
colonial interaction with the natural world, about the network of transnational ideas that moved not only from the
imperial center to the periphery but from the frontiers of empire back to Europe, the United States and much of
the world? This highly readable, multilayered global forest history illumines many historiographical questions
central to the field of British, imperial, and environmental history.

Barton identifies how “hard-headed” imperialists such as the Governor General of the East India Company,
Lord Dalhousie, and the first Conservator General of the Forests in India, Dietrich Brandis, laid down the
conceptual framework for large scale environmental reforms in India that later spread to the British colonies and
the United States. To peaceably appropriate India’s forests into state control, foresters created a model of
“multi-use” that reconciled competing claims between the state, private business, and local communities. The
success of the Indian Forest Service and the forestry laws in India provided the model for Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa, Siam, Nepal, Kenya, Uganda, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Singapore, Maylay, and even, as
Barton argues, the United States. By the 1920s, the British managed forests ten times the size of the British
Isles. By 1939, they administered every forest type in the world with fifty separate forest services. Though other
scholars like Richard Groves explored earlier premonitions of environmental thought as it emerged in the
scattered writings of surgeons and botanists, Barton’s book provides the first global history of the colonial
environmental enterprise that maps out this revolution of land management from its inception in 1855 to the
present.

Barton draws heavily on early forestry journals, parliamentary reports, confidential memorandums, forest
service control journals, and early-published accounts of forest history by former forestry officials. He saves this
book from being a “top down” history by showing how a symbiosis of Indian and other local indigenous
knowledge created a new Victorian synthesis. Indian farming techniques, sacred groves, and the Mughal
administrative structures form a new mosaic of practices fused with utilitarian and romantic strains that underlay
the new land-use approach. Some of the important legal features of Indian forestry, which spread around the
world, include “multi-use” and community forestry policies. His narrative explains how the struggle over forest
soveregnity and community or social forestry began during the period of British colonial forestry and continues
today. In one of the most interesting arguments, Barton shows how “ecological” ideas, such as climate theory
and preservation, animated discussions on this new Victorian synthesis—the “household of nature.” Empire
foresters constructed a grand theory of preservation for the sake of global and regional climate stability that
went far beyond resource management and timber extraction. While the modern environmental movement split
into ideological camps in the 1960s and 1970s that battle over community forestry, resource allocation, and
preservation, empire foresters integrated these opposing approaches under a single umbrella.
Barton does not argue that empire forestry developed all the multifarious expressions of the modern
environmental movement. British colonial forestry created the intellectual and legal framework necessary for the
development of large-scale environmentalism for much of the world. He places an emphasis on the larger
structures of governance as the actual implementation of early environmental reforms. Nor does he equate
scientific forestry with environmentalism. Empire forestry utilized scientific forestry, as developed in European
countries, as one of many conceptual and managerial tools for the large-scale environmental land use that
constituted this new approach to nature.

The book casts a wide net, with ample returns. Still, it might have given a better description of how American
foresters implemented British Indian models, an argument made in the book. Barton clearly describes the
influence of key Indian foresters, but he never systematically examines American forestry programs next to
those of the British Empire. The book also fails to describe whether or not British Empire forestry affected
countries outside of the Anglo political world. A discussion of Dutch and French colonial forestry programs
frame it in a truly global perspective. At a time of increased study of colonial environmental histories, a cross
comparative approach would be timely.

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism makes broad claims and in the end proves its point:
British Indian forestry provided the impetus for large scale conservation and environmental reforms in the
British Empire and beyond. The book’s arguments substantially influenced the field of British colonial
environmental history, and it will continue to exert itself upon American and global environmental history.
Recent articles by Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Lee Peluso seem to extend Barton’s argument that empire
forestry originated in India and spread to the rest of the empire. They trace the extension of a professional
system of British forestry from its origins in India to Thailand and Malaysia, giving it a term very similar to the
title of his book, “empires of forestry”. With major studies like this validating much of his work, his book should
continue to have a growing importance on the field in the coming years.