Global Environmental Borderlands in the Age of Empire
A symposium sponsored by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at 91勛圖厙, co-organized by Robert Batchelor, David Bello, and Ryan Jones
This symposium and the forthcoming volume marked an opportunity to (re)consider the environmental contexts of borderlands and frontiers of different political orders, particularly pluralistic imperial regimes, roughly between the 15th and 19th centuries. While examining how environmentality was negotiated by human actors of bordering (or overlapping) political regimes, the symposium also explored possibilities that go beyond the binaries between nature and culture, and environmental and political orders. Participants first gathered for a two-day workshop in October 2019 at 91勛圖厙’s satellite campus in Taos, New Mexico, collaborating for two days while also finding time to visit historic sites and share some meals together. The planned meeting for spring 2020 was postponed to fall 2021 (via Zoom) because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Presenters and their paper titles included: Robert Batchelor (Georgia Southern University), Ocean Currents as Borderlands: The Case of the Western Pacific; David Bello (Washington & Lee University), Qing Imperial Pastoralism in Trans-Grassland Practice; Purnima Dhavan (University of Washington), Crafting a New Paradise: Imperial Power and Sufi Mediation in Mughal Kashmir; Blake Earle (Texas A&M-Galveston), Fisheries and Environmental Administration Along the Fringes of Empire: The United States and Great Britain in the North Atlantic; Jarrod Hore (Macquarie University), Underworlds and Borderlands: Colonial Geology in the Pacific World; Ryan Jones (University of Oregon), Whales, Russians, Tungus, and Americans: The Sea of Okhotsk’s Living Oceanic Borderland; Martin Kalb (Bridgewater College), Namibia’s Beaches as a Colonial Environmental Borderland; Nathaniel Millet (Saint Louis University), Native People and the Caribbean Environment: c. 1550-1850; Ruth Morgan (Monash University), Camels in the Australian Desert: A More than Human History of Water and Settler Colonialism; and Kathryn Olivarius (Stanford University), Immunocapitalism: Epidemiology and Empire in the American South.