Modern Forests

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Modern Forests presents an environmental, institutional, and cultural history of forestry in colonial eastern India, exploring how regional political dynamics and biogeographic processes shaped land and forest management. The analysis highlights the interconnected social and biophysical factors that drove landscape change. Through a cultural lens, it uncovers the debates and uncertainties that marked two centuries of colonial rule, during which forests were identified, classified, and subjected to various control regimes to serve both imperial and local interests. The author investigates the diverse conditions that led to different forest management systems and how certain ideas gained prominence over time. By focusing on regional socio-political processes and ecologies, the work offers a fresh perspective on environmental history, advocating for cross-continental comparative studies rather than a strict divide between third-world and first-world experiences. Additionally, it presents a historical anthropology that avoids apolitical separations between foreign and indigenous perspectives on nature, emphasizing that shared concerns can shape different cultural understandings. The book argues that the politics of cultural construction should be explored through institutional histories and ethnographies of state-making, culminating in a genealogy of development linked to forest conservation in colonial eastern India.