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The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World

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The Unending Frontier is an ambitious project by historian John F. Richards: a environmental history of the world during the Early Modern Era. The book is a synthesis of the existing historical and scientific research on the ways in which humans affected the environment around the world. Surveying a broad range of sources, from political histories to dendrochronology studies, Richards argues that during the Early Modern Era more capable and efficient states developed, which encouraged economic production that in turn supported the increasing human impact on the environment. At the same time, global European expansion created a sense of abundance that promoted overuse and waste that still affects us today.

In his introduction and first section, Richards sets up his argument and gives the global political and climatic context of the Early Modern Era. He argues that the evolution of more complex, efficient, and powerful forms of political and military organization established a public order, which helped states get through economic and biological problems that would earlier have been disastrous. This stability allowed markets, land use, and urban populations to grow at a rate not seen before. European colonizers claimed lands and waters all over their world and exerted control over them with the financial and political support of European states. Expansion painted the picture of a world of abundance, which contrasted with the scarcity of early modern life and cultivated an image of endless environmental resources. These actions have had long-term effects, some of which we are only now able to see, including devastation of indigenous cultures and peoples as well as the depletion of biodiversity and many forms of pollution.

Richards identifies four major patterns of environmental impact: intensified human land use along frontiers, biological invasions from global human movement, the depletion of larger animal and marine mammal populations, and motivating energy and resource scarcities. The rest of the book is a series of case studies of a different region or practice, all of which reveal the interplay of some or all of these themes. For example, chapter Ten reveals how Spanish settlers impacted ecological landscape of Mexico through gold and silver mining, large-scale livestock cultivation, and the decimation of the Indian population because of disease. In Brazil, which Richards explores in Chapter Eleven, transient land use for massive cattle ranches along with sugar production and gold and diamond mining had the biggest ecological impact, as well as the disease and military conquest of the Tupi Indians in particular. And the history of New World cod fisheries is featured in Chapter Fifteen, which reveals how European technological and maritime advances, as well as increasing state support, enhanced the growth of a global market and the "world hunt."

Richards is able to draw out key themes and arguments from the studies of environmental impact to make an argument about the nature of human-environmental interaction during one period of history. This is one of the most valuable aspects of this book. Another is the way Richards integrates different kinds of environmental histories, from thought and culture to human impact. He often explores the ways that the environment has controlled humans, for example, through events like droughts.
Richards' book is clearly written for an academic audience, but is an accessible synthesis of complicated historical and scientific research. The numerous case studies provide not only ample evidence for his claims, but also serve as excellent references for those studying the history, environmental or otherwise, of the Early Modern Era. In this example of how environmental history can use new information to see old sources in a new light, Richards elegantly weaves a tale of how human modes of production and organization have enabled them to impact and control the environment. This book was on the whole impressive and informative.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Not only is it truly global in scope but it brings to bear a profound understanding of its subject matter and the peoples whose history and experience it so eloquently details. Richard's knowledge of the appropriate science, especially botany and zoology, is compelling and introduced in judicious amounts at just the right time to explain some feature of what happened. Environmental history is beginning to poke through into many accounts of the early modern; Richards accelerates this process and we should be hopeful that anyone writing about the history of this period will take a look at his insights for their explanatory value. For example, in understanding how Western Europe came to thrive once it could extend the area from which it drew sustenance. Few political developments of this period anywhere in the world were not profoundly affected by the environment. This book would fit very well as a precursor to Something New Under the Sun: the environmental history of the 20th century by J R McNeill. All we need is someone to write a global environmental history of the 19th century to bridge the gap.

Though written for an academic audience, it should appeal to anyone who has been stimulated to think more by Al Gore's recent Inconvenient Truth and who hungers for historical context. Richard's has no comparable political agenda but his data and interpretation are immensely generative and educational. If I had an 18 year old child embarking on a college education, I think this is one of a handful of history books that would change the way they think about the modern world. This is what good history looks like!

I was especially intrigued by his coverage of Tokugawa Japan as a role model society which developed ways to contain its way of life within sustainable limits on a small island without needing to invade the outside world. There is an interesting contrast with Western Europe and perhaps in the long run much to learn from what Tokugawa Japan actually achieved well before there was full scientific understanding of the environment.

The only real issue I have with his incredibly broad coverage is that he spends little time on the spread of agriculture in New England and the Mid West, having covered fur trapping some excellently. He covers what he calls the 'World Hunt' well but doesn't really cover the extension of cultivation in 17-18th century America including the establishment of Cotton in the Southern USA in the way he cover sugar and other crops elsewhere.

It would also be interesting if he brought to bear some overall estimate, however approximate, of the rough impact of his unending frontier on national income/wealth in the main imperial countries. This may be a little outside his scope but it would add a sense of proportion to supplement his brilliant local income estimates for various trades.