Project Objectives
The Environmental Security project at the Centre for History and Economics has sought to contribute to new approaches in the emerging field of environmental history and to reinvigorated approaches to economic history, opening areas of enquiry linking the history of economic thought, the regulation and economic importance of resource use, the history of property and the law, and the history of science. Previous meetings and publications have addressed topics such as the history of common property, the relationships between ecological management and state formation, current developments in environmental history, and histories of energy consumption. The project currently embraces the four strands described below.
Energy and growth in Europe, 1600-2000 »
This project was begun in 2003 as a network of scholars seeking to provide consistent methods and approaches to quantifying the energy history of Europe from the pre-industrial age to the present. Reconstructions of energy consumption in England and Wales, Italy and Sweden have been published, and volumes are in preparation on the Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Current research is focused on understanding linkages between particular energy carriers and key growth sectors in historical economies, and transitions between forms of energy consumption. Power to the people. Energy and economy in Europe, 1600-200, by Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, will be published by Princeton University Press in their ‘Economic History of the Western World’ series.
Soap and ashes: resource dependency in early modern Britain »
The alkalis provided by the burning and refining of plant matter, commonly called potashes, were the key alkaline component of the early modern chemical industry, and thus a key element in the production of soap, glass, ceramics, and the processing of textiles. Their supply largely relied on a major trade through the geopolitical bottleneck of the Baltic; during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more wood was annually converted to potash in the eastern Baltic and shipped to north-west Europe than grew in all of the British Isles and Netherlands. This research, part supported by the British Academy, seeks to outline the scale and chronology of this little researched trade, and the implications for ecologies and economies at each end of the commodity chain.
‘Expertise for the future’: histories of environmental prediction and policy »
This project was initiated in 2009 by Libby Robin (Australian National University), Sverker Sörlin (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) and Paul Warde (Centre for History and Economics). Its focus is on the development of environmental prediction, and the reception of predictions optimistic and pessimistic since the sixteenth century, ranging from personal observation to interpretation of longitudinal data trends (prices, demographic data, meteorological records) and the increased importance of statistical modelling. These issues have been explored in a series of workshops addressing histories of resource use and fears of scarcity; demography and epidemiology; climate science; conservation; deforestation; the emergence of the idea of global change; and the international exchange of ideas and technology. As a result of the project Yale University Press will be publishing an anthology, The future of nature. Documents of Global Change, featuring 35 documents from 1713 to the present, each provided with introductory commentaries by leading figures in environmental history, the history of science, climate science and cultural geography.
The invention of sustainability »
A first meeting on this theme was held at Harvard on October 2008. This workshop was concerned with the intellectual history of what is now commonly called ‘sustainability’, and how themes of risk and durability were engaged in agronomy, forestry, political economy and economics in the early modern and modern eras. The programme will develop with a particular concern for interactions between early modern economic thinking, ecological and chemical theory, and institutional practice.