During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company monopolized salt production in Bengal, and the British sought a new market for English salt in India. As previous studies have emphasized, external political and economic forces devastated indigenous industry and its workers. However, working conditions were influenced more by the natural environments of the salt-producing localities, particularly the availability of fuel, which was indispensable to the process of manufacture. The industry had always benefitted from abundant grass and straw for use as fuel. However, as grasslands were lost due both to constant river encroachment and to land clearance for cultivation, straw prices increased with the emergence of a regional market for biomass fuels, so that increasing difficulties in procuring fuel gradually made the salt industry costly. That state of affairs was accelerated by the advance of economic activity in general and a shortage of coal in particular. The changes made workers much more dependent on the fuel market.

This paper offers an environmental history of a group of forced migrants who were sent to work on a Soviet industrial project in the far north during the 1930s. As part of the drive to industrialize the country rapidly, the Soviet state deported thousands of peasants who had been declared class enemies to the previously desolate Khibiny Mountains in order to serve as the labor force for a new socialist mining town. These forced migrants became known as “special settlers”. I argue that the integration of the environment as a dynamic force in the social history of Stalinism enriches current explanations for why the Soviet state was often unable to carry out its intentions during industrialization. I also maintain that through the pursuit of the global process of industrialization, the Soviet government contributed to making the special settlers in the Khibiny Mountains vulnerable to natural hazards.

This essay explores how gender and generational dynamics in peasant communities in colonial Zimbabwe were reshaped between 1930 and 1965 by factors introduced by colonization. British rule brought dramatically greater market opportunities and access to new agricultural tools. Some peasants readily adopted ploughs, combining these new tools with indigenous methods of production and environmental management to increase output and market sales while developing new hybrid ways of working the land. These options allowed some young men to evade the demands of, and obligations to, their fathers, while the new methods often increased women’s workloads, exacerbating gender tensions. In the wake of World War II, Rhodesian state agricultural programmes sought to reshape African farming practices dramatically, initiatives that were justified as protecting the environment and modernizing the peasant sector. These measures permanently allocated and demarcated peasant land, imposed onerous environmental protection measures, and encouraged peasants to follow labour-intensive production methods based on European techniques. These conditions restricted young men’s access to land and imposed intense demands on women of all ages; in practice, however, these changes led to a renegotiation of gender and generational dynamics, most obviously in a wave of protests that threatened state control of the countryside.

The São Francisco River provided very obvious, close-by forms of sustenance for local communities. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the river became the place for large hydro-electric facilities, large-scale flooding, and population resettlement. A decade later, the federal government began working on pilot irrigation projects that would lead to areas described today as the Brazilian California. Hydro-power for Brazilian cities such as Recife and Salvador and irrigation for grapes and mangoes destined for the United States and Europe are among the eco-system services this river supplies. The purpose of federal policies for the north-east went beyond mitigation of the consequences of droughts, the hydraulic approach, and started to follow an economic approach based upon development; as a consequence, river and user came to be distant from one another. The two major intensive uses of the river, electricity and irrigation, threaten the long-term sustainability of this system.