Imperial Ecology: Environmental order in the British Empire, 1895-1945, by
Peder Anker, Harvard University Press, 拢41.50, ISBN 0674005953
AS CHILDREN of the new physics, we like to explain unexpected events from
superstorms to stock market plunges by invoking chaotic behaviour within
apparently stable systems. New 杏吧原创 was at it in November with a
cover feature on a theory that linked earthquakes, premature births, market
crashes and mass extinctions. But 70 years ago when the stock market crashed,
they called in ecologists to explain.
Oxford鈥檚 Charles Elton鈥攐n his uppers because nobody could afford to buy
furs from his chief sponsor, the Hudson Bay Company in Canada鈥攎ade an
attempt to explain business cycles in terms of ecological succession, climax and
plague.
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He compared bull and bear markets to the demographics of voles, mice and
lemmings. He then went on to promise that the markets would one day recover as
assuredly as a population of lemmings recovers.
Peder Anker鈥檚 Imperial Ecology is the unexpected story of how
late-imperial British ecologists took their arcane studies of marine life off
Spitzbergen or the game of southern Africa and brought them to bear on very
different areas of interest. These ecologists fashioned from their studies a
view of human ecology broad enough, in this telling, to embrace cycles of sexual
activity in Japanese brothels, famine in central Asia, the building blocks for
national economic planning and the cultural underpinnings of Nazism. An
eye-opener.