New Earth Histories

A kaleidoscopic rethinking of how we come to know the earth.

This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, Pacific, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian conceptions of the earth’s origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed mod...

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A kaleidoscopic rethinking of how we come to know the earth.

This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, Pacific, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian conceptions of the earth’s origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed modern environmental sciences? How have different world traditions understood human and geological origins? How does the inclusion of multiple cosmologies change the meaning of the Anthropocene and the global climate crisis? By carefully examining these questions, New Earth Histories sets an ambitious agenda for how we think about the earth.

The chapters consider debates about the age and structure of the earth, how humans and earth systems interact, and how empire has been conceived in multiple traditions. The methods the authors deploy are diverse—from cultural history and visual and material studies to ethnography, geography, and Indigenous studies—and the effect is to highlight how earth knowledge emerged from historically specific situations. New Earth Histories provides both a framework for studying science at a global scale and fascinating examples to educate as well as inspire future work. Essential reading for students and scholars of earth science history, environmental humanities, history of science and religion, and science and empire.

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Foreword
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Introduction: New Earth Histories
Alison Bashford, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette
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List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Foreword
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Introduction: New Earth Histories
Alison Bashford, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette
Part I New Earthly Cosmologies
1 Of Celestial Gods and Terrestrial Globes in Modern India
Sumathi Ramaswamy
2 Living in an Eggshell: Cosmological Emplacement in Nguyễn Vietnam, 1802–1883
Kathryn Dyt
3 The Mountain’s Many Faces: How Geologists Mistook Chomolungma for Everest
Ruth Gamble
4 Think like a Fish: New Oceanic Histories
Anne Salmond, Dan Hikuroa, and Natalie Robertson
Part II New Geo-Theologies
5 The Voices of an Eloquent Earth: Tracing the Many Directions of Colonial Geo-Theology
Jarrod Hore
6 The Spiritual Geographies of Plate Tectonics: Javanese Islam, Volcanology, and Earth’s New History
Adam Bobbette
7 Geo-Spiritualities of the Flood: Political Geologies of the Great Deluge on the Mountains of Anatolia
Zeynep Oguz
Part III New Elemental Histories
8 “Glass Worke”: Precious Minerals and the Archives of Early Modern Earth Sciences
Claire Conklin Sabel
9 “The Agent of the Most Dire of Calamities”: Ice, Waste, and Frozen Futures
Alexis Rider
10 Hydropolitics for a New Nation: Hydrological Origins and Limits for the Australian Interior
Ruth A. Morgan
11 Earth Time, Ice Time, Species Time: The Emergence of Glacial Chronology
Emily M. Kern
12 Exchanging Fire: A Planetary History of the Explosion
Nigel Clark
Part IV New Geo-Temporalities
13 Holocene Time Perspective
Perrin Selcer
14 “American Blitzkrieg” or “Ecological Indian”? Inequalities in Narrating Environmental Degradation through Deep Time
Melissa Charenko
15 Imperial Melancholy and the Subversion of Ruins in the Amazon
Raphael Uchôa
16 Gondwanaland Fictions: Modern Histories of an Ancient Continent
Alison Bashford
Afterword
Alison Bashford, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette
Notes
Index
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