Environmental History

Time: Thursdays 12:30pm to 2:00pm, unless otherwise stated

Meeting Location: Colin Matthew Room, Faculty of History, unless otherwise stated

Week 1 (1 May)
Thomas Laskowski (MPhil Islamic Studies and History)
Writing the Environmental History of the Medieval Islamic East

“Local histories” from the eastern Islamic world are a rich potential source for environmental history. My thesis focuses on three such texts produced between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries AD and interrogates how the “local” was framed and defined in reference to geography, the land, and its natural (and supernatural!) features. The exploitation of natural resources—most notably water—is also a subject of concern for the authors of these histories, and the link between control of the environment, prosperity, and just government forms an important part of the ethical dimension of the texts. In this presentation I will give a quick overview of my thesis—with plenty of context for non-specialists—and discuss broader questions about writing the environmental history of the Middle East and Islamic world in this period, and what the possibilities (and limitations) of the available sources are.

Week 3 (15 May)
Katerina Szylo (DPhil History)
The Depths of Dissent: Labor, Environmental, and Political Dynamics in the Donbas Miners’ Strikes

This research investigates the role which environmental and labor activism played in shaping dissent during the coal miners’ strikes in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Originating from wage cuts and difficult working conditions and developing into political concerns, the miners’ strikes highlight the relationship between environmental protection, labor rights, and self-determination. This paper expands the definition of “dissent” in the Soviet context by exploring how non-intelligentsia members participated in activism. While issues of industrial pollution, radiation, and irrigation were approached by dissident intelligentsia circles, different and less studied sites of labor, environmental, and political activism also emerged. The coal miners’ strikes of 1989, 1993, and 1996 offer a rich opportunity to expand our knowledge of labor and environmental activism in Ukraine in the 1980s and 1990s, thereby deepening our contextual understanding of factors which shaped the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first years of independent Ukraine.

Week 5 (29 May)
Lucia Nixon (Classical Archaeology, Senior Tutor, St Hilda's, Co-Director, Sphakia Survey)
Toward an Archaeology of Sustainability: Resource Packages and Landscape Management in Sphakia, Southwest Crete

Using evidence from the Sphakia Survey, a multiperiod archaeological project in south-west Crete, this article has two goals. The first is to contribute to a newly emerging field, the archaeology of sustainability. The investigation of sustainability in Sphakia uses five main kinds of evidence: environmental, archaeological/material, textual, oral, and patterns of activity that seem ‘difficult’ or ‘inconvenient’. Sphakia is a large area of highly dissected terrain with a wide altitudinal range – in many ways, a ‘tough’ landscape, where agropastoralism has been its main economy. The second goal is to introduce the concept of a Resource Package (RP), a combination of perceived resources in an area, as an analytical tool for landscape study. Evidence for identifying agropastoral RPs of various scales, used at a particular time, includes imports, such as pottery and obsidian, which can suggest exchange for a local resource or product; sacred sites; coins; texts and inscriptions; place-names and other toponyms; and maps. The concept of RPs can usefully be applied synchronically and diachronically to multiperiod projects like this, as well as more generally to other landscapes, ‘tough’ or not. Sustainable strategies (that is, maximising resources and RPs without exhausting them) were used in the Prehistoric, Graeco-Roman and Byzantine– Venetian–Turkish epochs in Sphakia; some may be relevant for the future.

Week 7 (12 June) ONLINE via Microsoft Teams (click here to join)
Bill Smith (DPhil History)
Chains of Control and Reins of Resistance: Nonhuman Animals and the Plantationocene in the American South

This paper is part of the first chapter of my dissertation, which looks at the impact of nonhuman animals on the institution of slavery in the American South. It examines multispecies entanglements within the plantation complex and argues for the centrality of nonhuman animals to methods of control exerted by enslavers, as well as strategies of resistance developed by the enslaved. In particular, it will focus on how enslavers weaponized the threat of non-domesticated animals living beyond the plantation in creating a geography of containment while also using domesticated animals—especially dogs and horses—as living embodiments of surveillance and recapture in a calculated process to enforce spatial control and limit the movement of enslaved persons. In this way, the plantation is viewed as a highly manipulated social and environmental ecosystem that linked the exploitation of human and nonhuman animals to the broader framework of capitalism, monoculturalism, and the maintenance of power.