David Igler

Anniversary Forum

Longitudes and Latitudes

BEFORE LEAVING England in 1772 on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean, Captain James Cook supplied himself with four recently invented "clock machines" that promised to record reliable time at sea. These chronometers—the name wouldn't stick until the 1780s—allowed Cook to establish longitude readings, and when combined with latitude readings, enabled precise surveying work of islands and continental shorelines. The "watches," as Cook frequently referred to them, cost the British Admiralty a small fortune; to Cook they were priceless. Cook kept the chronometers in locked wooden boxes and issued keys to the first lieutenant, the onboard astronomer, and himself. Cook gave orders that some combination of these individuals "were always to be present at the winding them up, and the comparing one with the other." Longitude and latitude served Cook and subsequent Pacific navigators exceedingly well, for among other reasons, returning to previously recorded coordinates (such as an island with wood and water) was a useful skill when exploring an ocean that covered one-third of the earth's surface.	1
This nautical anecdote reflects my current attraction to ocean basins as frameworks for historical analysis, and more specifically, the Pacific Basin as a site of ecological exchanges, exploitations, and migrations. Ocean basins provide (dare I say?) natural contexts in which to study human and non-human interactions, in part because they offer the possibility of moving us beyond the nation-state and terrestrial-based boundaries that often awkwardly fit our studies of nature as a historical force. However—and let me be clear about this—mine is not a call for environmental historians to scrap land-based parameters of the local, regional, or national variety, and suddenly embrace waterscapes as more useful frameworks. Instead, I want to encourage us to exploit more fully those necessary coordinates of eighteenth-century sea-faring exploration: longitude and latitude.	2
As some of our field's recent and most celebrated books attest, environmental history may provide an unparalleled opportunity for studying history's length and breadth, its longitudes and latitudes. Or, to restate a mantra of the field, ecological factors both unite and divide human societies throughout time and around the globe. Longitudinal studies offer us a long-range vision into the past and reveal how human thought, institutions, and actions have confronted the environment across the centuries. Latitudinal studies are by nature comparative, transnational, and/or global, and at their best, they enlighten us about the world while simultaneously shedding new light on issues and places closer to home.	3
Three examples of latitudinal history immediately jump to mind: J. R. McNeill's Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (W.W. Norton, 2001), Ramachandra Guha's slender volume Environmentalism: A Global History (Longman, 1999), and Alfred W. Crosby's classic study Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986) (which is quite longitudinal as well). The sheer breadth of these studies can stagger the imagination, ranging across continents for specific forces of ecological and historical change. In them we find the actors, ideas, and non-human elements that fuse and sometimes separate the human predicament of living on earth. Future latitudinal studies hopefully will build upon these attributes and also take us in new and surprising directions. For instance, I would greatly appreciate a global history of twentieth-century urbanism that actually takes seriously the concept of cities as urban ecosystems. My wish list also would include a comparative treatment of disease etiology in pre-modern England and China. But wish lists aside, latitudinal studies in environmental history should build upon the comparative and transnational energies of today's scholarship while utilizing the interdisciplinary tools from which our field originated.	4
While enthralled by examples of broad, latitudinal history, I find myself equally engrossed with the finely honed longitudinal approach. Scale matters a great deal, Richard White reminds us, and the local scale remains imperative in this era of breakneck globalization, especially when that local study has the longitudinal capacity to carry us across centuries. White's first book, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (University of Washington, 1979), may have pioneered the local—and richly longitudinal—study for a generation of environmental historians. If the purely place-centered local study seems outmoded to many of today's environmental historians, some of White's students are creatively refining the approach. Joseph Taylor's Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (University of Washington, 1999) de-centers the local place for the 125-year historical process of fisheries exploitation. Longitudinal studies of specific issues or sets of ideas continue to offer tremendous possibilities. Donald Worster's Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, 1985) remains one of my favorite texts in this regard, in part for its evocative writing and stories, and yet also for its 250-year exploration of specific ecological ideas. Such longitudinal histories—ambitious and clearly daunting for most historians these days—provide us with a crucial temporal telescope to view human and non-human interactions on earth. The point is not simply to extend the timeline of any given study, but instead to develop in a longitudinal fashion those issues and processes that most reflect and refract historical interactions with nature.	5
What can an appreciation of latitude and longitude offer future environmental histories? Rather than criss-crossing the Pacific for years on end, Captain James Cook could quickly return to the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 (for his death, as fate and the islanders would have it) because months earlier he had accurately recorded the islands' longitude and latitude. He knew the islands' coordinates, even if he didn't know how to behave once he arrived there. Environmental historians share a similar need for latitude and longitude because our unique causal agents of change—"nature" and ecological processes—span the globe and traverse the centuries. In this age of global positioning systems, historians still need to know more than simply our distance from the equator or time from Greenwich Mean; instead, we need to follow those latitude and longitude lines around the earth and see what else is out there.	6
David Igler is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920 (California, 2001), and currently is working on a history of the eastern Pacific Basin prior to 1850.

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