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 three strands described below. Please also contact us for further information or to share research interests.

                

 

Energy History »

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. Power to the people: energy in Europe during the last five centuries, by Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, will be published by Princeton University Press in their 'Economic History of the Western World' series later in 2013. The project now works in tandem with the Energy History project at Harvard University, and is in the process of developing strands on energy flows embodied in trade in 19th and 20th century Europe; transitions to fossil fuels in early modern Britain; and the history of arguments promoting the Arctic as an energy frontier.

 

Resource dependency 1500 - 1850 »

From 2009 this project has been building up a network of scholars working on various aspects of resource dependency and thinking about sustainability in the pre-industrial world. Themes of this research include the international trade in potash (alkalis provided by the burning and refining of plant matter, the key alkaline component of the early modern chemical industry, and hence thus a key element in the production of soap, glass, ceramics, and the processing of textiles); ideas of resource management and 'sustainability', particularly in regard to forestry and agronomy; and the place of resources and the land in Enlightenment political economy.

 

‘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 in 2013 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.