The Unending Frontier

It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reach—and their numbers—as never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history, The Unending Frontier offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period.

John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. The Unending Frontier considers each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humans—whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes—altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.

John Richards was Professor of History at Duke University and editor of Land, Property and the Environment (2001). He was also coeditor of World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (1988) and Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (1983). He died in 2007.

List of Maps
List of Tables
Preface
Introduction

Part I. The Global Context
1. The Early Modern World
2. Climate and Early Modern World Environmental History

Part II. Eurasia and Africa
3. Pioneer Settlement on Taiwan
4. Internal Frontiers and Intensified Land Use in China
5. Ecological Strategies in Tokugawa Japan
6. Landscape Change and Energy Transformation in the British Isles
7. Frontier Settlement in Russia
8. Wildlife and Livestock in South Africa

Part III. The Americas
9. The Columbian Exchange: The West Indies
10. Ranching, Mining, and Settlement Frontiers in Colonial Mexico
11. Sugar and Cattle in Portuguese Brazil
12. Landscapes of Sugar in the Antilles

Part IV. The World Hunt
13. Furs and Deerskins in Eastern North America
14. The Hunt for Furs in Siberia
15. Cod and the New World Fisheries
16. Whales and Walruses in the Northern Oceans

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index