Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

BOOK REVIEWS
Burke, Edmund, III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds. 2009. The Environment and World
History. California World History Library, Vol. 9. Berkeley, California: University of
California Press. 361 pages, ISBN-13 978-0-520-25687-3 Cloth ($60.00), ISBN-13 978-0-520-
25688-0 Paper ($24.70).
Edited by two prominent world historians, this book covers different regional cases of state
formation or state developmental pressures encouraging their own local, bad, environmental
outcomes. The historical data is both material and ideological: it is mostly on state water
management policy in different regions combined with how a state’s social definition of its
environment interacted with material environmental outcomes. Both the distant past and the
present are treated in this same ‘state developmentalist’ model. That is their world historical
contribution: to get away from Eurocentric historiographic concepts of epochs based on
economics and to analyze instead common civilizational forms of political economy that have
historically repeated the same environmental problems in the past or the present. Thus, the
historical time periods of the chapters ranges from several thousand years (in the astonishingly
good synthesis by Burke of multiple Middle Eastern river-canal agricultural systems created by
ancient state developmentalism in this area) to only several hundred years (as in the case of
European states’ changes to the Rhine River).
Most analyses are single case studies of one region or one major state in a region
dominating the environmental context (i.e., chapters on China or Russia), however, there are
several comparative chapters like Burke’s chapter on multiple state developmentalism in the same
region of the ancient Middle East, another one by Michael Adas on comparative rice frontier
expansions in Southeast Asia and the environmental effects it had on different delta regions, and
somewhat in Sedrez’s chapter on Latin America and the environmental contexts created by the
policies of different states.
The book is divided into three sections. Part one is called “Overview” though it is really a
world historical theory of the editors’ own (discussed below), with which some authors in the
book’s chapters disagree. Part two, “Rivers, Regions, and Developmentalism,” has regional or
comparative regional studies about water, shockingly leaving out North America and the
hegemonic United States despite its ability to materially and ideologically determine much of the
world’s environmental conditions in different regions for much of modern history after World
War II. I think the editors intentionally left out North America/United States because to include it
would go against another part of their theory (this part is not demonstrated and is unconvincing,
extremist, and artificially dichotomized) that intra-regionality is more tangible and more
important than political economic theories of cross-regional pressures in world history. Thus
world-embracing theories of dependency theory or world-systems analysis via commodity chains
that have defined modernity as an innately cross-regional phenomenon, built states
internationally, and defined environmental historiography from the global level inward to the
regional is the epistemological ‘other’ with which they disagree. I am sad to see such a harsh
methodological dichotomy ‘theorized’ between global and regional historical processes of politics
because such an excellent regional book can only be improved by including this ‘glocal’ aspect of
regional history. However, the book suffers from its lack of review of this perspective in
Copyright ©2011, American Sociological Association, Volume XVI1, Number 1, Pages 244-278
ISSN 1076-156X