Yale University Library Research Guides: Geotrip: A Guide for People Doing Field Work in the Geosciences: Colonialism and the Geosciences

Books in the Catalog

Decolonising and Internationalising Geography: Essays in the History of Contested Science by Edited by Bruno Schelhaas, Federico Ferretti, André Reyes Novaes, Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9783030495169
Publication Date: 2020
This volume contains selected papers presented at two Symposia of the Commission on the History of Geography of the International Geographical Union within the 25th International Congress of History of Science and Technology which took place in Rio de Janeiro in July 2017. The papers address processes of 'decolonising' and 'internationalising' science in the 19th and 20th century, with a special emphasis on geography. Internationalization, circulation and dissemination of geographical concepts and ideas are in the focus. The volume includes case studies on Latin America, tropical regions as well as Europe and Japan. There is also an emphasis on the history of international congresses and organizations and on the international circulation of knowledge.
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano; Isabel Allende (Foreword by)
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9780853459910
Publication Date: 1997-01-01
The classic survey of Latin America's social and cultural history, with a new introduction by Isabel Allende Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.
Africa as a Living Laboratory by Helen Tilley
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9780226803470
Publication Date: 2011-04-15
Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise--environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological--in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.
Weaponizing Maps by Joe Bryan; Denis Wood
Call Number: E59.C25 B78X 2015
ISBN: 9781462519910
Publication Date: 2015-03-05
Maps play an indispensable role in indigenous peoples' efforts to secure land rights in the Americas and beyond. Yet indigenous peoples did not invent participatory mapping techniques on their own; they appropriated them from techniques developed for colonial rule and counterinsurgency campaigns, and refined by anthropologists and geographers. Through a series of historical and contemporary examples from Nicaragua, Canada, and Mexico, this book explores the tension between military applications of participatory mapping and its use for political mobilization and advocacy. The authors analyze the emergence of indigenous territories as spaces defined by a collective way of life--and as a particular kind of battleground.
Geoethics by Max Wyss (Editor); Silvia Peppoloni (Editor)
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9780127999357
Publication Date: 2014-11-18
Edited by two experts in the area, Geoethics: Ethical Challenges and Case Studies in Earth Sciences addresses a range of topics surrounding the concept of ethics in geoscience, making it an important reference for any Earth scientist with a growing concern for sustainable development and social responsibility. This book will provide the reader with some obvious and some hidden information you need for understanding where experts have not served the public, what more could have been done to reach and serve the public and the ethical issues surrounding the Earth Sciences, from a global perspective.
The Global Interior by Megan Black
Call Number: HD9506 .B46 2018
ISBN: 9780674984257
Publication Date: 2018-10-01
When one thinks of the history of U.S. global expansion, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Its very name declares its narrow portfolio. Yet The Global Interior reveals that a government organ best known for managing domestic natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported and projected American power. Interior's first task was to oversee settler colonialism in the American West. When that seemed complete, the department maintained its role but expanded its reach. Megan Black's detailed analysis shows how, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Interior cultivated and exploited its image as an innocuous scientific-research and environmental-management organization in order to drive and satisfy America's insatiable demand for raw materials. Interior continues to operate in indigenous lands through, for instance, coal mining on the Crow reservation and oil leasing on the Blackfeet reservation. It pushes the boundaries of territoriality through offshore drilling. And in the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, it has led lithium surveys in Afghanistan, among other activities abroad. Indeed, Interior is more than global: the department now manages a satellite that prospects natural resources in outer space. Black demonstrates that in a period marked by global commitments to self-determination, Interior helped the United States maintain key benefits of empire without the burden of playing the imperialist villain. As other expansionist justifications?manifest destiny, hemispheric pacification, Cold War exigencies?fell by the wayside, Interior ensured that the environment itself would provide the foundational logic of American hegemony.
Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism by Michael A. Osborne
Call Number: Q127 F8 O78 1994
ISBN: 025334266X
Publication Date: 1994-05-01
The colonization of Algeria in the nineteenth century was premised on the belief that Europeans, as well as non-indigenous animals and plants, could acclimatize to life in North Africa. While traditional French science showed little interest in such practical matters as attempting to adapt exotic plants and animals to new environments, support came from the Societe zoologique d'acclimatation - the ""French Sierra Club"" - whose story is the subject of this book. Because its work was politically useful in support of France's colonial ambitions in Algeria and elsewhere, the Society found favor with Napoleon III's government, and its influence was soon widespread. For example, the Society fostered the creation of nature preserves in Africa and zoos in Paris, and its ideas changed the research agendas of pure science as well. In this major study of how the acquisition of empire affected French science, Michael A. Osborne treats in turn the founding of the Society and its evolution to 1920; its monument to Napoleon III's ""modern"" Paris, the Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation; the Society's core scientific ideology of Lamarckian transformation; the history of provincial acclimatization societies in Nancy and Grenoble; and the Society's activities in the colonies of the new French empire. An important study of the patronage and politics of science, this book offers new insights for students of environmentalism, science history and policy, and modern European history.
The Matter of Empire by Orlando Bentancor
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9780822981602
Publication Date: 2017-01-30
The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor's original study ties the colonizers' attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire's rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of scholasticism, particularly in the work of Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter and enslavement, despite the inherent contradictions to moral principles. Bentancor grounds this metaphysical framework in a close reading of sixteenth-century debates on Spanish sovereignty in the Americas and treatises on natural history and mining by theologians, humanists, missionaries, mine owners, jurists, and colonial officials. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.
The Profits of Nature : Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China by Peter B. Lavelle
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9780231550956
Publication Date: 2020
In the nineteenth century, the Qing empire experienced a period of profound turmoil caused by an unprecedented conjunction of natural disasters, domestic rebellions, and foreign incursions. The imperial government responded to these calamities by introducing an array of new policies and institutions to bolster its power across its massive territories. In the process, Qing officials launched campaigns for natural resource development, seeking to take advantage of the unexploited lands, waters, and minerals of the empire’s vast hinterlands and borderlands.In this book, Peter B. Lavelle uses the life and career of Chinese statesman Zuo Zongtang (1812–1885) as a lens to explore the environmental history of this era. Although known for his pacification campaigns against rebel movements, Zuo was at the forefront of the nineteenth-century quest for natural resources. Influenced by his knowledge of nature, geography, and technology, he created government bureaus and oversaw state-funded projects to improve agriculture, sericulture, and other industries in territories across the empire. His work forged new patterns of colonial development in the Qing empire’s northwest borderlands, including Xinjiang, at a time when other empires were scrambling to secure access to resources around the globe. Weaving a narrative across the span of Zuo’s lifetime, The Profits of Nature offers a unique approach to understanding the dynamic relationship among social crises, colonialism, and the natural world during a critical juncture in Chinese history, between the high tide of imperial power in the eighteenth century and the challenges of modern state-building in the twentieth century.
Metals in Past Societies by Shadreck Chirikure
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9783319116419
Publication Date: 2015-03-18
This book seeks to communicate to both a global and local audience, the key attributes of pre-industrial African metallurgy such as technological variation across space and time, methods of mining and extractive metallurgy and the fabrication of metal objects. These processes were transformative in a physical and metaphoric sense, which made them total social facts. Because the production and use of metals was an accretion of various categories of practice, a chaine operatoire conceptual and theoretical framework that simultaneously considers the embedded technological and anthropological factors was used. The book focuses on Africa's different regions as roughly defined by cultural geography. On the one hand there is North Africa, Egypt, the Egyptian Sudan, and the Horn of Africa which share cultural inheritances with the Middle East and on the other is Africa south of the Sahara and the Sudan which despite interacting with the former is remarkably different in terms of technological practice. For example, not only is the timing of metallurgy different but so is the infrastructure for working metals and the associated symbolic and sociological factors. The cultural valuation of metals and the social positions of metal workers were different too although there is evidence of some values transfer and multi-directional technological cross borrowing. The multitude of permutations associated with metals production and use amply demonstrates that metals participated in the production and reproduction of society. Despite huge temporal and spatial differences there are so many common factors between African metallurgy and that of other regions of the world. For example, the role of magic and ritual in metal working is almost universal be it in Bolivia, Nepal, Malawi, Timna, Togo or Zimbabwe. Similarly, techniques of mining were constrained by the underlying geology but this should not in any way suggest that Africa's metallurgy was derivative or that the continent had no initiative. Rather it demonstrates that when confronted with similar challenges, humanity in different regions of the world responded to identical challenges in predictable ways mediated as mediated by the prevailing cultural context. The success of the use of historical and ethnographic data in understanding variation and improvisation in African metallurgical practices flags the potential utility of these sources in Asia, Latin America and Europe. Some nuance is however needed because it is simply naïve to assume that everything depicted in the history or ethnography has a parallel in the past and vice versa. Rather, the confluence of archaeology, history and ethnography becomes a pedestal for dialogue between different sources, subjects and ideas that is important for broadening our knowledge of global categories of metallurgical practice.
Blood and Diamonds by Steven Press
Call Number: Online book.
ISBN: 9780674259522
Publication Date: 2021-04-06
Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany's ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America--at the cost of African lives.Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds--gems extracted from war zones--has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent U.S. market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the World Wars.Amid today's global frenzy of mass consumption, Press's history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

How to Search Articles+ for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Content

It can be difficult to locate information on colonialism and imperialism's impact on the geosciences. The books on the left from our catalog show just how complex the topic is, especially when it comes to the history of resource exploitation and European colonial powers.

The best way to search Articles+ is to use Boolean operators — AND, OR, NOT. Quotation marks "" and parentheses () can also be used to structure a query, much like how you structure mathematical equations to show the order of operations. In tools like Articles+ and Google Scholar, instead of using NOT, the system uses a minus sign, as in the search exoplanet atmospheres -"hot jupiters"

Let's look specifically at EDI resources now.

(geology OR geophysics OR "earth sciences") AND (diversity equity inclusion)

The above search is generally useful for finding information about diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is also available here for browsing.

A different search, where we replace the AND (diversity equity inclusion) with AND (colonialism OR imperialism), might seem like an ideal way to find more information about imperial powers and the geosciences, and you can view that modified search here. When you take a look, note that many of the top resources are not about the most recent 500 years of exploitation, but about human migration patterns into Europe and the Americas and their impact and evidence.

Searching for something more specific, like American imperialism, will yield results that are much more consistent with your information need. America is not the only modern or historical colonial/imperial power, so you can also search for the intersection of the geosciences with the Spanish conquest or another topic of interest.

Articles+ has some additional features that make it more useful for an in-depth search for this topic than Google Scholar. For example, you can use the topic/subject filters on the left-hand side to drill down to a specific set of subjects, and you can also limit to document type, like journal articles or dissertations. By default, Articles+ only shows you items we can access electronically (about 80% of our online resources; some of our highly specialized business and chemical databases aren't compatible, unfortunately), and you can click on "Add results beyond your library's collection" below the main search box to see items that you could order through interlibrary loan.

How to Search Proquest Natural Sciences Collection for EDI Content

Above, we looked at Articles+. Here, we are looking at Proquest Natural Science Collection, which will limit our results to many natural sciences fields, including most earth and planetary science subdisciplines.

One important difference between ProQuest databases, including the Natural Science Collection, and Articles+ is that the Boolean operator NOT is the preferred method of negation in a ProQuest database. Keep that in mind if you need to remove any words or phrases from your results. It's also harder to share links to specific searches in ProQuest databases, so please use this link to try out any of the searches below for yourself: https://yale.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/naturalscience?accountid=15172

Here, a search for colonialism AND geosciences will display a robust set of resources focused on a range of topics, ranging from professional topics that impact departments and groups to grappling with the entire topic of colonialism in the geosciences.

We can also search for topics like belonging. As a heads up, if you type belonging AND geosciences, many of the results will treat the word belonging in a broad way, with meanings ranging from "this rock belongs to X time period" to the actual meaning we want. A search for belonging AND geosciences AND professional refines the results because it lets ProQuest know that we're interested in a "human in STEM" topic, that of how we improve belonging in the geosciences profession.

Taking a look at any of the books in the left-hand panel and viewing their citations can also be useful for finding specific authors and topics to search either here or in Articles+. You may also take interest in highlighting passages, proper names, and terminology used in blog posts and outreach articles like this one from the magazine of the Geological Society of London about the Society's historical links to slavery and colonialism.

Geotrip: A Guide for People Doing Field Work in the Geosciences: Colonialism and the Geosciences

Resources for Inclusive and Just Geosciences

Books in the Catalog

How to Search Articles+ for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Content

How to Search Proquest Natural Sciences Collection for EDI Content

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