Tarai was a landmass running along an east-west axis just to the south of the Himalayan ranges and was a part of Himalayan Kumaun ecology. At the stroke of independence, the colonialists had made plans to clear the Tarai and settle it with Indian soldiers returning from World War II. The task of actual clearing fell on the sovereign Indian government as the pressure to settle refugees piled on top of the plan to settle soldiers. With the nation struggling to meet its food requirements a new vision was born to turn the Tarai into a “granary” for the province. Under these contingencies, the Tarai became a landmass wherein new settlers were encouraged to perfect the art of productive agriculture. The post-colonial developmentalist state set up a model state farm to propagate such practices. To the outside developer and modernizer, Tarai came across as empty though, in fact, it was inhabited by a limited number of hill communities and villages. As Tarai was turned into a farming land with settlers from beyond, a local democratic movement for autonomy erupted in the region that called into question the method of land settlement and transformation.

This chapter articulates the book’s main intervention and contribution, ending with a brief discussion of the phrases “is a book” and “like a book.” Premodern writers who said something “is” or is “like a book” forged the very conceptual connection that How the World Became a Book traces through English culture. Contains six major sections covering the contribution and intervention of the book.

Sub-Saharan Africa was on the threshold of a new and violent era in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ensuing four centuries would see innovative forms of military organisation, novel cultures of militarism underpinning such systems, and new wars, as well as new ways of fighting them. There were often different factors at work in different regions; the presence of external drivers was a key distinction between Atlantic Africa and the rest of the continent, for instance. However, warfare across early modern Africa had much in common, in terms of the aim to control factor endowments, to maximise population, and to construct enduring ideological systems, whether territorially or culturally defined. In some ways – certainly in terms of the underlying trends and broad contours of Africa’s military history – the existence or absence of external intrusion is a distraction, however significant it was in particular places at particular times. The outcome of the processes in motion between c. 1450 and c. 1850 was an expansion in military scale, the professionalisation of soldiery, the adoption of new weaponry, and the militarisation of the polity – whether ‘state-based’ or otherwise. The militarisation of African polities and societies was an ongoing process between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, a period which in many ways witnessed the laying of the foundations of modern African political systems; this would culminate in a veritable military revolution in the nineteenth century, a transformation in the organisation and culture of violence, without which Europe’s later partition of the continent cannot properly be understood.

Gwendolyn Alker considers particular aspects of Fornés’s work – including the way she asked her students to do yoga before writing, her various exercises developed to bypass the frontal cortex, and her prescient connections to the animal world – to argue for a “Fornésian ecology” and to evince its lessons for our collective futures on a damaged planet. Alker argues that the characters in Mud (alongside many of Fornés’s plays) must be understood through their relationship with each other and with their environment. Alker submits that Fornesian world-making prompts us to see the environment within the world of her plays, to be aware that we are outside that world and will never fully understand it, just as we cannot ever fully understand the animals that we encounter, even as Fornés’s plays challenge us to cultivate empathy for animals, understand their relevance, and believe in their truths, despite their otherness from ourselves.

This chapter outlines a historiography of the papacy and the environment and begins with several observations. First, papal approaches to the environment are shaped by the historical evolution of the papacy itself. Second, notions of environment and environmentalism are varied across secular, religious, and, by extension, papal discourse and action. Relatedly, these pluriform conceptions are influenced by locations that include geographic, epistemological, and socio-cultural. Thus informed, the chapter engages two distinct periods. The first is the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, wherein papal approaches to the environment were variously shaped by notions of wilderness, classical natural history, anthropocentrism, monastic spiritualities and activities, and expanding ecclesial infrastructure and temporal power. The second period begins with global industrialization around 1750 and continues through to today. Therein, papal environmentalism is especially expressed in modern Catholic social teaching that began with Leo XIII in 1891 and continues through Francis I, especially Laudato si’ in 2015.

This chapter examines the role of national and regional institutions in promoting integrated regulation and administration of biodiversity and forest management in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Drawing lessons from Morocco, it evaluates current legal and institutional challenges in the integrated management of forest and biodiversity. This chapter examines four fundamental themes raised by the legal and judicial protection of the forests. First, it examines the need for integrated regulation of biodiversity and forest management, given the interconnectedness of these two elements. Second, it evaluates integration gaps and challenges in laws relating to forest management and biodiversity in Morocco. Third, it evaluates institutional arrangements in forest management in Morocco, especially the role of the Water and Forestry Agency in activating integrated management of forest and biodiversity in Morocco. Fourth, it offers recommendations on how to advance integrated management of forest and biodiversity in Morocco and across the Maghreb region.

Columella wrote his Res rustica (c. AD 60/1–5) in the wake of a well-developed Roman tradition of agricultural writing. His approach to the ars distinguishes him from Republican predecessors such as Cato and Varro, however, and reflects the scientific culture of the artes of the early Empire. Columella presents agriculture as an august discipline requiring broad, interdisciplinary knowledge and theoretical understanding of nature. Depreciatory views of agriculture, imputed to other Romans, are explained as resulting from moral decline that has led to ignorance of correct technique. Columella’s discussions of manuring (Book II) and vine propagation (Book III) are shaped by his scientific conception of ars, as he argues that close appreciation of the principles of plant life provides the foundation for good agronomy. Columella’s treatise is not only the preeminent work of agronomy from Greco-Roman antiquity but also witness to the vibrant scientific culture of the artes.

Australia’s botanical diversity has shaped its literature of the environment. Through a selection of novels, short stories, and poetry, this overview focuses on the literary depiction of native species such as the coolabah, paperbark, and wattle. Structured chronologically, the discussion begins with Indigenous Australian narratives of plants, arguably the world’s oldest literary representations of botanical life. In the narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, plants are wellsprings of material and spiritual sustenance. Between British settlement and Federation, non-Indigenous narratives of Australian flora begin to appear. In these decades, literature negotiates the strangeness of antipodean plants in comparison to familiar European species. In post-Federation literature, the relationship between flora and nation becomes more pronounced. During this period, writers increasingly foreground the clearance of forests in the post-colonial state. Contemporary literature reveals an expanded understanding of plant ecologies and conservation realities. The work of Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal during these years establishes a precedent for later literary activism. The Anthropocene literature of recent decades confronts humanity’s escalating impacts on plants especially in Australian regions. Literary works critique climate disturbance, habitat degradation, urban development, and related exigencies that continue to imperil the future of plants in Australia.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

This chapter engages with social sciences theories about ‘institutions’. It illuminates not only the resilience but also the intensification of overland caravan trade thanks to an efficient organised system involving traders, Bedouin and Ottoman officials. The chapter tries to rely as much as possible on the viewpoint of caravan traders. It offers insights on historiographical debates about the changing roles of state institutions in the Late Ottoman Empire, the State’s legitimisation and its echoes among urban and nonurban caravan practitioners, and the economic and political competition by political entities that are built on the monopolisation of trading routes. The aim is to introduce a new panorama of the political economy of the Middle East that does not focus on the coastal and urban societies but on the hinterlands and steppes and considers theses spaces as elements of a region, that is, the intermediary space connecting the local and the world, on the one hand and connecting cultural affiliation with economic exchange on the other.