| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Environmentality, Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. By Arun Agrawal. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005, 344 pp. Photos, tables, figures. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

This is a rare and valuable book with an easy style that interweaves interconnected but separate themes. The plot unfolds in the hill forests and mountains of the Kumaon Himalaya, but has implications that resonate far beyond that little world. The creation of vast forest reserves in imperial India was a spectacular if early instance of the expansion of governmental power beyond cultivated land. By 1904, more than 230,000 square miles of India were under the administrative control of the Forest Department. The process of securing control over resources, land, and labor in the late nineteenth century was followed by intense and complex low-intensity conflicts involving those who were denied access to the forest space. Foresters saw themselves as "guardians of the forest" which evolved into a full-blown ideology precisely at the time when their own depredations of the woods were of an unprecedented degree. As Agrawal explains, the more threatened nature was seen to be, the more imperative it became to protect it. Ironically, this made it even more difficult to see the realm of nature as distinct from that of the human world.

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