Deforesting the Earth or Questioning Slavery

Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis: An Abridgment

Author: Michael Williams

“Anyone who doubts the power of history to inform the present should read this closely argued and sweeping survey. This is rich, timely, and sobering historical fare written in a measured, non-sensationalist style by a master of his craft. One only hopes (almost certainly vainly) that today’s policymakers take its lessons to heart.”—Brian Fagan, Los Angeles Times  Published in 2002, Deforesting the Earth was a landmark study of the history and geography of deforestation. Now available as an abridgment, this edition retains the breadth of the original while rendering its arguments accessible to a general readership.   Deforestation—the thinning, changing, and wholesale clearing of forests for fuel, shelter, and agriculture—is among the most important ways humans have transformed the environment. Surveying ten thousand years to trace human-induced deforestation’s effect on economies, societies, and landscapes around the world, Deforesting the Earth is the preeminent history of this process and its consequences.  Beginning with the return of the forests after the ice age to Europe, North America, and the tropics, Michael Williams traces the impact of human-set fires for gathering and hunting, land clearing for agriculture, and other activities from the Paleolithic age through the classical world and the medieval period. He then focuses on forest clearing both within Europe and by European imperialists and industrialists abroad, from the 1500s to the early 1900s, in such places as the New World, India, and Latin America, and considers indigenous clearing in India, China, and Japan.  Finally, hecovers the current alarming escalation of deforestation, with our ever-increasing human population placing a potentially unsupportable burden on the world’s forests.

Read also Theory of Incomplete Markets or Hard Choices

Questioning Slavery

Author: James Walvin

James Walvin plots the story of black slavery and traces the intellectual and historical arguments which have swirled around its history in recent years. This comparative analysis of slavery in the English-speaking Americas offers new perspectives and a wide-ranging thematic organization which covers the racial, social, economic, political, cultural, gender and colonial dimensions of this complex subject.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Acknowledgements
1	Forging the Link: Europe, Africa and the Americas	1
2	But Why Slavery?	19
3	Varieties of Labour	29
4	Domination and Control	49
5	Colour, Race and Subjugation	72
6	Men and Women	96
7	The Culture of Resistance	117
8	Cultivating Independence	136
9	Ending Slavery	158
10	Freedom and Varieties of Slavery	172
	Notes	183
	Index	195