Five emus to the king of Siam : environment and empire / edited by Hellen Tiffin.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Annotation This book considers these imperial èxchanges¿ and charts some contemporary legacies of those inequitable imports and exports, transportations and transmutations. Sheep farming in Australia, transforming the land as it dispossessed the native inhabitants, became a symbol of (new, white) nationhood. The transportation of plants (and animals) into and across the Pacific, even where benign or nostalgic, had widespread environmental effects, despite the hopes of the acclimatisation societies involved, and, by extension, of missionary societies ¿planting the seeds of Christianity.¿ In the Caribbean, plantation slavery pushed back the ¿jungle¿ (itself an imported word) and erased the indigenous occupants ¿ one example of the righteous, biblically justified cultivation of the wilderness. In Australia, artistic depictions of landscape, often driven by romantic and g̀othic¿ aesthetics, encoded contradictory settler mindsets, and literary representations of colonial Kenya mask the erasure of ecosystems. Chapters on the early twentieth century (in Canada, Kenya, and Queensland) indicate increased awareness of the value of species-preservation, conservation, and disease control. The tension between traditional and Èuroscientific¿ attitudes towards conservation is revealed in attitudes towards control of the Ganges, while the urge to resource exploitation has produced critical disequilibrium in Papua New Guinea. Broader concerns centering on ecotourism and ecocriticism are treated in further essays summarising how the dominant West has alienated ǹature¿ from human beings through commodification in the service of capitalist p̀rogress¿.

Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire; Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; Illustrations; Introduction; Empire's Proxy: Sheep and the Colonial Environment; Representations of Landscape and Nature in Anthony Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main and James Anthony Froude's The English in the West Indies; Polluted River or Goddess and Saviour? The Ganga in the Discourses of Modernity and Hinduism; Ecotourism A Colonial Legacy?; Colonial Nature-Inscription On Haunted Landscapes; "Transported Landscapes "Reflections on Empire and Environment in the Pacific

The "I" in Beaver Sympathetic Identification and Self-Representation in Grey Owl's Pilgrims of the WildThe Sandline Mercenaries Affair Postcoloniality, Globalization and the Nation-State*; Planting the Seeds of Christianity Ecological Reform in Nineteenth-Century Polynesian London Missionary Society Stations; Five Emus to the King of Siam Acclimatization and Colonialism; "Back to the World "Reading Ecocriticism in a Postcolonial Context; Views from Van Diemen's Land Space, Place and the Colonial Settler Subject in John Glover's Landscapes

Colonial Cordon Sanitaire Fixing the Boundaries of the Disease Environment"The Animals Are Innocent" Latter-Day Women Travellers in Africa*; Contributors; Index

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