| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

John F. Richards. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. (The California World History Library, number 1.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xiv, 682. $75.00.
This is a major work of world and environmental history that experts and nonexperts will be consulting and quoting for years to come. Any library of size or scholarly pretension will have it on its shelves. The book does not cover the entire world—no book could—but it does analyze what happened in a number of areas around the globe where changes in human densities and intensities triggered radical environmental changes from approximately 1500 to 1800.	1
John F. Richards begins with a general discussion of what happened in that period, including thirty pages on climatic changes such as the little ice age and briefer fluxions. Then he launches into informed and mature inquiries that take us around the world to Taiwan, China, Japan, Britain, Russia, South Africa, the West Indies, Mexico, Brazil, North America, and Siberia. He finishes offshore with considerations of "The World Hunt" for cod, whales, and walrus in the North Atlantic and adjacent waters. The book is nothing if not ambitious.	2
Richards pulls the rug out from under trendy "experts," who, incited to analysis by present-day pollutions of air and water and steep declines in biodiversity, blame all on the industrial revolution in Europe and North America, quoting William Blake about "Satanic mills" again and again. The world has suffered from humanity's sharp elbows for many thousands of years, and the acceleration of current dangers date not from James Watt but from at least as far back as Christopher Columbus.	. . .

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