ABSTRACT
Environmental management in colonial South Asia was at once a biological, economic, social, and political process. It is helpful, therefore, to understand its history as a pastiche: a complex interplay of post-Enlightenment political ideology, race theory, physiocratic ‘improvement’ missions, biomedical presumptions, and agro-economic manoeuvers of landscapes and lives. These principles and practices dovetailed and diverged given the priorities in India of the British Empire, which also borrowed from and jettisoned older, precolonial modes and methods of ecological management as necessary and expedient. This chapter focuses on four broad parameters – forests, water, social unrest, and animals – through which this history unfolded and materialised.
