ABSTRACT
National histories, by their very defi nition, tend to be parochial and territorial in scope. The fl uidity of change wrought by diverse interactions and movements of plants, animals, and people across lands and oceans are restricted and solidifi ed in narratives that seek to assert a territorial integrity based on a few biophysical factors and human actions within tightly defi ned national political boundaries. We would expect environmental and ecological histories to be different, to adopt more expansive perspectives to convey the fl uidity and dynamism of interactions between social and biophysical nature in the making of landscapes without being constrained by national boundaries. Oddly enough, few do. It seems as though most environmental and ecological histories submit to the disciplining practices of nation-making narratives, tending to reproduce and reinforce the parochial visions and insular territorial imaginations of their nationalist counterparts.1
