Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire

Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire

Author: Anna Winterbottom

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2023-10-15

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0228019877

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Elizabeth Gwillim (1763–1807) and her sister Mary Symonds (1772–1854) produced over two hundred watercolours depicting birds, fish, flowers, people, and landscapes around Madras (now Chennai). The sisters’ detailed letters fill four large volumes in the British Library; their artwork is in the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection of McGill University Library in Canada and in the South Asia Collection in Britain. The first book about their work and lives, Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire asks what these materials reveal about nature, society, and environment in early nineteenth-century South India. Gwillim and Symonds left for India in 1801, following the appointment of Elizabeth’s husband, Henry Gwillim, to the Supreme Court of Madras. Their paintings document, on one hand, the rapidly expanding colonial city of Madras and its population and, on the other, the natural environment and wildlife of the city. Gwillim’s paintings of birds are remarkable for their detail, naturalism, and accuracy. In their studies of natural history, Gwillim and Symonds relied on the expertise of Indian bird-catchers, fishermen, physicians, artists, and translators, contributing to a unique intersection of European and Asian natural knowledge. The sisters’ extensive correspondence demonstrates how women shaped networks of trade and scholarship through exchanges of plants, books, textiles, and foods. In Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire an interdisciplinary group of scholars use the paintings and writings of Elizabeth Gwillim and Mary Symonds to explore natural history, the changing environment, colonialism, and women’s lives at the turn of the nineteenth century.


Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire

Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire

Author: Anna Winterbottom

Publisher:

Published: 2023-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780228018865

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Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire is the first detailed study of the art and correspondence of Elizabeth Gwillim and her sister Mary Symonds in South India. The book explores what their work reveals about natural history, the natural environment, colonialism, and women's lives at the turn of the nineteenth century.


Gender and the Environment

Gender and the Environment

Author: Nicole Detraz

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-12-20

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 1509511962

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Climate change, natural disasters, and loss of biodiversity are all considered major environmental concerns for the international community both now and into the future. Each are damaging to the earth, but they also negatively impact human lives, especially those of women. Despite these important links, to date very little consideration has been given to the role of gender in global environmental politics and policy-making. This timely and insightful book explains why gender matters to the environment. In it, Nicole Detraz examines contemporary debates around population, consumption, and security to show how gender can help us to better understand environmental issues and to develop policies to tackle them effectively and justly. Our society often has different expectations of men and women, and these expectations influence the realm of environmental politics. Drawing on examples of various environmental concerns from countries around the world, Gender and the Environment makes the case that it is only by adopting a more inclusive focus that embraces the complex ways men and women interact with ecosystems that we can move towards enhanced sustainability and greater environmental justice on a global scale. This much-needed book is an invaluable guide for those interested in environmental politics and gender studies, and sets the agenda for future scholarship and advocacy.


Connecting Women

Connecting Women

Author: Barton C. Hacker

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781944466442

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« Women's networks proliferated during the long nineteenth century in the Atlantic World and began spreading globally. Abetted by transformative changes in communication and transportation (the subject of the first chapter), women established links among themselves, sometimes informally, sometimes as part of formal organizations. Most goal-oriented networks, particularly those with social and political agendas, were personal, national or transnational in nature and inevitably excluded those who did not share the goal. Such activist networks and their influences are the main focus of Part One. Topics addressed include women's national and international networks in British temperance associations; British anti-slavery societies; Italian crime syndicates; the Istanbul region of the Ottoman Empire; Philippine suffragism, early twentieth-century Portuguese political organizations, and Great War relief efforts in France. The chapters in Part Two examine the diverse literary networks that women writers enjoyed, abided, or disdained during the long nineteenth century. Included are the themes of British female utopia and dystopia; how the work of some British women poets both affected and reflected the variety of networks in which they were enmeshed; the intensely personal networks of American writers Mary Moody Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and Alice James; Salem witches reimagined as Romantic heroines by American novelists Caroline Rosina Derby and Ella Taylor; the efforts of Southern autobiographers Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Avery Meriwether early in the twentieth century to negotiate a place for themselves and the South in American national history; and the significance of women's networks present in the South and absent in Brazil as depicted in Evelyn Scott's 1923 memoir. »--


Beyond Nature's Housekeepers

Beyond Nature's Housekeepers

Author: Nancy C. Unger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-10-05

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0199986002

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From pre-Columbian times to the environmental justice movements of the present, women and men frequently responded to the environment and environmental issues in profoundly different ways. Although both environmental history and women's history are flourishing fields, explorations of the synergy produced by the interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender are just beginning. Offering more than biographies of great women in environmental history, Beyond Nature's Housekeepers examines the intersections that shaped women's unique environmental concerns and activism and that framed the way the larger culture responded. Women featured include Native Americans, colonists, enslaved field workers, pioneers, homemakers, municipal housekeepers, immigrants, hunters, nature writers, soil conservationists, scientists, migrant laborers, nuclear protestors, and environmental justice activists. As women, they fared, thought, and acted in ways complicated by social, political, and economic norms, as well as issues of sexuality and childbearing. Nancy C. Unger reveals how women have played a unique role, for better and sometimes for worse, in the shaping of the American environment.


Gender and Empire

Gender and Empire

Author: Angela Woollacott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2006-01-23

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0230204856

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One of the first single-authored books to survey the role of sex and gender in the 'new imperial history', Gender and Empire covers the whole British Empire, demonstrating connections and comparisons between the white-settler colonies, and the colonies of exploitation and rule. Through key topics and episodes across a broad range of British Empire history, Angela Woollacott examines how gender ideologies and practices affected women and men, and structured imperial politics and culture. Woollacott integrates twenty years of scholarship, providing fresh insights and interpretation using feminist and postcolonial approaches. Fiction and other vivid primary sources present the voices of historical subjects, enlivening discussions of central topics and debates in imperial and colonial history. The circulation of imperial culture and colonial subjects along with conceptions of gender and race reveals the integrated nature of British colonialism from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Authoritative and approachable, this is essential reading for students of world history, imperial history and gender relations.


The Imperial Harem

The Imperial Harem

Author: Leslie P. Peirce

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780195086775

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The unprecedented political power of the Ottoman imperial harem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is widely viewed as illegitimate and corrupting. This book examines the sources of royal women's power and assesses the reactions of contemporaries, which ranged from loyal devotion to armed opposition. By examining political action in the context of household networks, Leslie Peirce demonstrates that female power was a logical, indeed an intended, consequence of political structures. Royal women were custodians of sovereign power, training their sons in its use and exercising it directly as regents when necessary. Furthermore, they played central roles in the public culture of sovereignty--royal ceremonial, monumental building, and patronage of artistic production. The Imperial Harem argues that the exercise of political power was tied to definitions of sexuality. Within the dynasty, the hierarchy of female power, like the hierarchy of male power, reflected the broader society's control for social control of the sexually active.


Affluence and Freedom

Affluence and Freedom

Author: Pierre Charbonnier

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1509543732

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In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.


Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975

Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975

Author: Giusi Russo

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2023-03

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1496234944

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Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 tells the story of how women’s bodies were at the center of the international politics of women’s rights in the postwar period. Giusi Russo focuses on the United Nation Commission on the Status of Women and its multiple interactions with the colonial and postcolonial worlds, showing how—depending on the setting and the inquiry—liberal, imperial, and transnational feminisms could coexist. Russo suggests that in the early stages of identifying discriminating agents in women’s lives, UN commissioners overlooked the nation-state and went through a process of fighting discrimination without identifying the discriminator. However, it was the focus on empire that allowed for a clear identification of how gender constructs were instrumental to state politics and the exclusion of women. An emphasis on colonial practices also generated a focus on the body and radically shifted the commission’s politics from formal equality to a gender-based equilibrium of rights that emphasized practice rather than law. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Russo looks at the women living under colonial and postcolonial systems as the key actors in defining the politics of women’s rights at the UN.


Invisible Empire

Invisible Empire

Author: Pranay Lal

Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited

Published: 2021-10-30

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9354922899

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Viruses are the world's most abundant life form, and now, when humanity is in the midst of a close encounter with their immense power, perhaps the most feared. But do we understand viruses? Possibly the most enigmatic of living things, they are sometimes not considered a life form at all. Everything about them is extreme, including the reactions they evoke. However, for every truism about viruses, the opposite is also often true. So complex and diverse is the world of viruses that it merits being labelled an empire unto itself. And whether we see them as alive or dead, as life-threatening or life-affirming, there is an ineluctable beauty, even a certain elegance, in the way viruses go about their lives-or so Pranay Lal tells us in Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses. This is a book that defies categorisation. It brings together science, history and great storytelling to paint a fascinating picture of viruses as a major actor, not just in human civilisation but also in the human body. With rare photographs, paintings, illustrations and anecdotes, it is a magnificent and an extremely relevant book for our times, when we are attempting to understand viruses and examining their role in the lives of humans.