Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India

"The elegance and depth of [Sivaramakrishnan's] presentation makes Modern Forests an outstanding contribution to our discussion of the colonial past's formative influence on today's dilemmas." -- Environmental History "This is an outstanding book. Ostensibly dealing with the making and enforcing of forest conservation policy in Bengal, it ranges expertly across a vast terrain of European intellectual history, South Asian cultural anthropology, and colonial and postcolonial theory. It enlightens-in the proper sense-both through its grasp of historical detail and its comprehension of complex arguments." -- American Historical Review "What emerges from [Sivaramakrishnan's] study has importance much beyond the realm of forest history. Inter alia, he produces a vivid portrait of British colonialism at work in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." -- American Historical Review "Using a rich blend of anthropology and social theory, Professor Sivaramakrishnan traces the complex webs of social hierarchy as well as political conflict on the land, which shaped a forest frontier region of Bengal. The author's full command of his subject for the pre-colonial period enables him to make firm assessments about the transformation of land and society under European rule." -- Environmental History "[Sivaramakrishnan] valuably reminds us that history consists, perhaps even more, of what people actually did than what they said." -- American Historical Review "Quietly, but definitively, [Sivaramakrishnan] devastates a bent of postcolonial theorizing that assumes the colonial context to have been marked by a neat binary opposition between Western modernity and indigenous traditionalism." -- American Historical Review " . . . Modern Forests comes as a pleasant addition to a tradition of path-breaking works that combine disciplines and transcend artificial boundaries to look at the real world. Indeed, the book is astonishing as much for its academic analysis as for the breadth of the canvas. . . . [It] is a captivating story of the emergence of regimes of governance in Bengal over 200 years of colonial rule" -- Seminar: Protecting Nature "Among the dozen or so full-length studies [about India's forests] that have been published, this one stands out for the clarity of the argument and lucidity of style. . . . This is a book that sets standards that will be hard to equal, let alone surpass. It is a must for anyone interested in going beyond the superficial in knowing about the past and future of [India's] forests." -- Down to Earth