Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire

This book considers these imperial 'exchanges¿ and charts some contemporary legacies of those inequitable imports and exports, transportations and transmutations. Sheep farming in Australia, transforming the land as it dispossessed the native inhabitants, became a symbol of (new, white) nationhood. The transportation of plants (and animals) into and across the Pacific, even where benign or nostalgic, had widespread environmental effects, despite the hopes of the acclimatisation societies involved, and, by extension, of missionary societies ¿planting the seeds of Christianity.¿ In the Caribbean, plantation slavery pushed back the ¿jungle¿ (itself an imported word) and erased the indigenous occupants ¿ one example of the righteous, biblically justified cultivation of the wilderness. In Australia, artistic depictions of landscape, often driven by romantic and 'gothic¿ aesthetics, encoded contradictory settler mindsets, and literary representations of colonial Kenya mask the erasure of ecosystems. Chapters on the early twentieth century (in Canada, Kenya, and Queensland) indicate increased awareness of the value of species-preservation, conservation, and disease control. The tension between traditional and 'Euroscientific¿ attitudes towards conservation is revealed in attitudes towards control of the Ganges, while the urge to resource exploitation has produced critical disequilibrium in Papua New Guinea. Broader concerns centering on ecotourism and ecocriticism are treated in further essays summarising how the dominant West has alienated 'nature¿ from human beings through commodification in the service of capitalist 'progress¿.Tiffin, Helen is the author of 'Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire', published 2007 under ISBN 9789042022430 and ISBN 9042022434.