White Horse Press Books

A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness: Success and Failure in the Fight to Save an Ecosystem of Critical Importance to the Planet by Timothy J. Killeen is a comprehensive review of the recent history and future prospects for the pan-Amazon region. OPEN ACCESS, Published serially, from April 2021.

The Swamp of East Naples. Environmental History of an Unruly Suburb. A case study with worldwide resonance, the book takes East Naples as emblematic of the deep environmental changes wrought on peripheral areas by processes of energy transitions, economic development and urbanisation.

Animals and Society in Brazil, from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. This pioneering overview of how social relations were constructed as interspecies relations offers the reader a starting point for bringing these encounters into a historical narrative that unfolds over the course of several centuries of Portuguese South American colonial life.

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History, edited by David Moon, Nicholas B. Breyfogle and Alexandra Bekasova, offers new perspectives on the environmental history of lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them.

The Beloved Face of the Country: The First Movement for Nature Protection in Italy, 1880–1934, Luigi Piccioni (translated by James Sievert). In Italy, a network of associations and institutions for landscape and nature protection was built up and then eventually faded between 1885 and the beginning of the 1930s. Piccioni reconstructs the events of the nature protection movement, contextualising them in the cultural and political-institutional climate of the time; highlights the movement’s full inclusion in contemporary European protectionist initiatives; and takes stock of its significance and historical legacy.

Greening the City: Nature in French Towns from the 17th Century, by Charles-François Mathis and Émilie-Anne Pépy. Translated from the authors‘La Ville végétale (2017), the book explores the place of nature in the French urban environment from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. It reveals, rather than a monolithic narrative, a continuous, but fluctuating, interlacing of paving stones and plants.

The Environment and the European Public Sphere: Perceptions, Actions, Policies, edited by Christian Wenkel, Eric Bussière, Anahita Grisoni and Hélène Miard-Delacroix, contributes to a history of Europeanisation beyond the usual political turning points and limits. Drawing on recent research results from various disciplines, including history, sociology, law and political sciences, this volume addresses the methodological challenge of a European perspective on a transnational subject – one that is commonly distorted by a national prism.

Other recent publications includeSeeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History, edited by Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse. This edited volume, with a foreword by Alan Mikhail, is the first collective effort to take an original look at the Ottomans through the lens of environmental history. It will appeal to anyone interested in the environmental history of one of the world’s largest and most durable empires. This is followed by The State in the Forest. Contested Commons in the Nineteenth Century Venetian Alps, which sheds new light on key aspects of the nineteenth-century agrarian world, using a case study of conflict over use of wood – the principal source of energy and the primary raw material at the time – to offer an environmental history of the nineteenth century ‘great transformation’. In The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts, Peter Quigley reviews the devastating impacts modernist avant-garde, Marxism, some feminisms and postmodernism have enacted – through paranoia, blame, cynicism – on beauty, hope and desire. It rehearses why a ‘return to beauty’ was imperative, and what has happened to that return since the turn of the twenty-first century.

As a new development for 2021, we are publishing several books as Open Access titles, free to read or download, and accessible through a variety of online portals. A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness: Success and Failure in the Fight to Save an Ecosystem of Critical Importance to the Planet by Timothy J. Killeen is a comprehensive review of the recent history and future prospects for the pan-Amazon region. Published serially, from April 2021. Pathways: Exploring the Routes of a Movement Heritage (forthcoming) is an important new collection by internationally renowned scholars describing how trails and paths are pathways to the past – and serve as a physical and cultural infrastructure of human memory. While they lead the way forward for anyone out walking, they also point backwards, towards history. Also planned is an updated edition of Björn-Ola Linnér's The Return of Malthus. First published by The White Horse Press in 2003, this is a comprehensive analysis of the post-war fear of scarcity. Even more relevant today, it charts perceptions of and prescriptions for crises of population growth and resource shortage, which have had profound influence on agricultural, population and security policies from the Second World War to the present.

Animals and Society in Brazil, from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries (March 2021) is a pioneering overview of how social relations were constructed as interspecies relations which offers the reader a starting point for bringing these encounters into a historical narrative that unfolds over the course of several centuries of Portuguese South American colonial life. In showing the decisive importance of non-human animals in the development of Brazilian society, this volume provides a point of departure for the construction of an international corpus of knowledge in the fields of environmental history and human-animal studies, adding complexity to existing narratives and throwing new light on the role of Latin American societies within the global picture.

The Swamp of East Naples (September 2021) takes East Naples as emblematic of the deep environmental changes wrought on peripheral areas by processes of energy transitions, economic development and urbanisation. It interrogates modernity’s distinctive global processes of industrialisation and deindustrialisation as enacted on Naples’ former threshold of coastal and marshy ecosystems, now buried in the sedimentary accumulation of concrete, fumes and toxic chemicals unleashed by industrial and urban development. The book reconstructs the discursive and physical factors that created the East Naples ‘swamp’, from the late eighteenth century to the present, through its transition from actual swamp to metaphorical, an ambiguous space characterised by chaos and disorder, hostility and risks, but also resistance, dignity and hope. It is a story both local and global, of urbanisation, industrialisation and deindustrialisation, ecological risk and attempted regeneration.

Greening the City: Nature in French Towns from the 17th Century, by Charles-François Mathis and Émilie-Anne Pépy. (translated from the authors‘La Ville végétale), explores the place of nature in the French urban environment from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. It reveals, rather than a monolithic narrative, a continuous, but fluctuating, interlacing of paving stones and plants.

In translation from the Italian, Luigi Piccioni's The Beloved Face of the Country: The First Movement for Nature Protection in Italy, 1880–1934 describes how, in Italy, a network of associations and institutions for landscape and nature protection was built up and then eventually faded between 1885 and the beginning of the 1930s. Piccioni reconstructs the events of the nature protection movement, contextualising them in the cultural and political-institutional climate of the time; highlights the movement’s full inclusion in contemporary European protectionist initiatives; and takes stock of its significance and historical legacy.

2016 saw the publication of Paul Elliott’s British Urban Trees. A Social and Cultural History. c. 1800–1914. This book is the first major study of British urban arboriculture between 1800 and 1914 and draws upon fresh approaches in geographical, urban and environmental history. In another 2016 publication, The Eclipse of Urbanism and the Greening of Public Space: Image Making and the Search for a Commons in the United States, 1682–1865, Mark Luccarelli roots the rise of environmental awareness in the political and geographical history of the US. Considering history in terms of the categorical development of space – social, territorial and conceptual – the book examines the forces that drove people to ignore their surroundings by distancing culture from place and by assiduously advancing the dissolution of social bonds.

Leona Skelton's Tyne after Tyne: An Environmental History of a River’s Battle for Protection 1529–2015. (2017) offers a template for a future body of work on British rivers that dislodges the Thames as the river of choice in British environmental history. And it undermines traditional approaches to rivers as passive backdrops of human activities. Departing from narratives that equated change with improvement, or with loss and destruction, it moves away from morally loaded notions of better or worse, and even dead, river. Gabriella Corona’s A Short Environmental History of Italy: Variety and Vulnerability (2017), translated by Federico Poole, provides a convenient introduction to Italy's environmental history written by a leading author in the field.

Remaining in Italy, Giacomo Bonan’s The State in the Forest. Contested Commons in the Nineteenth Century Venetian Alps (2019) sheds new light on key aspects of the nineteenth-century agrarian world, using a case study of conflict over use of wood – the principal source of energy and the primary raw material at the time – to offer an environmental history of the nineteenth century ‘great transformation’.

In The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts, Peter Quigley reviews the devastating impacts modernist avant-garde, Marxism, some feminisms and postmodernism have enacted – through paranoia, blame, cynicism – on beauty, hope and desire. It rehearses why a ‘return to beauty’ was imperative, and what has happened to that return since the turn of the twenty-first century.

The White Horse Press has recently reprinted The Subterranean Forest, Rolf Peter Sieferle’s landmark study of the industrial revolution transition to fossil-fuel energy, more relevant than ever as the need to evolve beyond this system becomes increasingly urgent. Our current series of monographs includes detailed studies of environmental history in particular areas as well as wide-ranging thematic volumes. Among the former are Enclosing Water (2010) by Stefania Barca, an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy’s Central Apennines; Wapulumuka Oliver Mulwafu’s Conservation Song: A History of Peasant-State Relations and the Environment in Malawi, 1860–2000 (2011), and Lajos Rácz’s The Steppe to Europe: An Environmental History of Hungary in the Traditional Age (2013), the only English-language study of the environmental history of Hungary. The latter include two volumes on mountains – Marco Armiero’s A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011) and John Mathieu’s comparative history of mountains in the modern era The Third Dimension (translated from the German, 2011); and John Dargavel and Elisabeth Johann’s history of forestry Science and Hope: A Forest History (2013), named by Choice as an ‘outstanding academic title’. In a similar scholarly but accessible vein, Ian Rotherham’s Eco-history: An Introduction to Biodiversity and Conservation (2014).

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History, edited by David Moon, Nicholas B. Breyfogle and Alexandra Bekasova, offers new perspectives on the environmental history of lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them.

The Environment and the European Public Sphere: Perceptions, Actions, Policies, edited by Christian Wenkel, Eric Bussière, Anahita Grisoni and Hélène Miard-Delacroix, contributes to a history of Europeanisation beyond the usual political turning points and limits. Drawing on recent research results from various disciplines, including history, sociology, law and political sciences, this volume addresses the methodological challenge of a European perspective on a transnational subject – one that is commonly distorted by a national prism.

Other edited collections from The White Horse Press include the 2006 essay collection Soils and Societies, which explores the multi-faceted relationship between human culture and soils, across nations and eras; the highly topical Environmental and Social Justice in the City, edited by Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud and Richard Rodger (2011); and Thinking Through the Environment, edited by Timo Myllyntaus, which offers global perspectives on the intersections of mind and environment across a variety of disciplines, from history to politics to the visual arts. Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination, edited by William Beinart, Karen Middleton and Simon Pooley (2013) is a collection of essays on human constructions of Nature.

A Fairytale in Question: Historical Interactions between Humans and Wolves, edited by Patrick Masius and Jana Sprenger (2015), is a collection of essays that aims to grasp the maincurrents of thought about interactions with the wolf in modern history. International in range and chronological in organisation, this volume roots study of human–wolf relationships coherently within the disciplines of environmental and animal history for the first time.

Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History, edited by John Gillis and Franziska Torma (2015), studies the history, meaning and materiality of the marine environment. Here the history of oceanic sciences meets that of literary and artistic imagination, offering vivid insights into the meanings as well as the materiality of waves and swamps, coasts and coral reefs.

Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History, edited by Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse, with a foreword by Alan Mikhail, is the first collective effort to take an original look at the Ottomans through the lens of environmental history. It will appeal to anyone interested in the environmental history of one of the world’s largest and most durable empires.

Our series of environmental history readers, suitable for students, is attracting increasing attention from course-designers. Comprising essays selected from our journals, Environment and History and Environmental Values, each inexpensive paperback volume addresses an important theme in environmental history, combining underlying theory and specific case-studies. The first volume, Bio-invaders (2010) investigates the rhetoric and realities of exotic, introduced and ‘alien’ species; the second, Landscapes (2010) explores the conceptualisation of environments as landscape, philosophically and historically; while the third, Indigenous Knowledge (2012) investigates how indigenous peoples from various cultures interact with and conceptualise their environments. Animals, examining human relationships with non-human others, and exploring dynamics of exploitation, preservation and cultural interpretation, appeared in 2014. Trees (2015) addresses the roots of environmental history in forest history, the power-relations that have been and continue to be played out in global forests and the psycho-social importance of trees. Farming, published in 2016, addresses ‘the link between the landscape and nutrition’, the complex set of factors by which food production results from human knowledge of, interaction with and attempted mastery of the natural environment.

We have a modest environmental philosophy list: in 2012 we reissued the classic essay collection by Richard Sikora and Brian Barry, Obligations to Future Generations (Temple University Press 1978; The White Horse Press 1997 and 2012). Dominic Hyde’s Eco-Logical Lives, an intellectual biography of Richard Sylvan (some of whose environmental philosophy books were published by The White Horse Press) and Val Plumwood, appeared in 2014. In 2015 we published Anne Frank’s Tree. In this important and original interdisciplinary work, Eric Katz explores technology’s role in dominating both nature and humanity in a meditation on the opposing themes of domination and autonomy as they relate to the uses of technology in environmental policy and in the genocidal policies of the Holocaust.

Collections integrating anthropology and geography are Changing Deserts: Integrating People and their Environment, edited by Lisa Mol and Troy Sternberg (2012) and Modern Pastoralism and Conservation: Old Problems, New Challenges, edited by Troy Sternberg and Dawn Chatty (2013, originally published in China). Aligned with our new journal, Nomadic Peoples, our short anthropological list also now includes Dawn Chatty’s From Camel to Truck, a republication of a seminal 1986 work. Forthcoming in 2017 are an important study of the social and spatial history of tribal conflict, Herder Warfare in East Africa by Gufu Oba; and a collection focusing on the rapidly changing conditions of nomadic life, Pastoralist Livelihoods in Asian Drylands: Environment, Governance and Risk, edited by Ariell Ahearn and Troy Sternberg, with Allison Hahn.