Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162150

For the Indian princes, hunting was not just a pleasurablepastime, rather it served clear political functions. The actual andperceived boundaries of their territories were shaped by hunt-ing pursuits and privileges. This is the first time we see an in-depth description of the workings of the management of ecol-ogy by princely states. The main thrust of the book is a culturalargument about the display of sovereign power through theecology of hunting. Hughes claims that hunting was not justabout shooting animals; rather it affected the actual biophysicalecology of the region. The princes saw hunting as an integralpart of their rule, with their careful management of wild placesand intentional agrarian policies. They bred pigs, protected ti-gers and black bucks and encouraged wild fowl. Closely exam-ining the princes’ artful management of the local ecology,Hughes argues that unlike the western binary of animals andhumans, and nature and culture, the ecological ideals of Indianprinces were at ease with the blurring of those boundaries andwere in fact reaping the social and cultural capital that flowedfrom the breach of such boundaries.

The princes guarded their hunting grounds because thoseplaces were important stages upon which they could performtheir sovereign-like status. They managed landscape as an imageof their overall governance qualities and in the process also ac-quired an impressive knowledge of the natural history of theirterritories. They saw the landscape as a sign of the legitimacy oftheir rule and, at least in rhetoric, their bounty delivered to theirsubjects. In hunting animals, especially large predators, such astigers and leopards, they internalized some of their characteris-tics which help them project their image as brave, but alsofearful, potentates.

Hughes claims that this princely ecology was different from theBritish sportsman ethos and relationship towards nature. TheBritish ideals of hunting codes driven by late nineteenth-centuryideas of liberalism of discipline, endurance and self-sufficiency,were not so attractive to the princes. The princes hunted to createand affirm different political and social hierarchies, whereas theBritish hunted to show pluck and individual courage. The motivesof the princes and thus the functionality of the hunt went beyondjust the display of personal character.

The first three chapters of the book look at the diversity ofhunting practices, species endowment and political strategies ofthe three princes. The princes coveted big game species, such astigers, which enhanced the status of their states as good huntingareas. The princes knew very well the value of wild game, especiallysome attractive and rare species, which they protected and used aspolitical capital by offering hunts to both their fellow princes, noblesubjects and British officials. Hughes convincingly shows that theIndian princely ecology was far from an ideal socio-political envi-ronment in which the subjects of pre-colonial Indian rulers lived ina fully accessible nature and its resources. She shows that just as thelater colonial state reduced access of local people to their envi-ronmental resources, albeit for a different reasons, so had theprinces. The fourth chapter focuses on the theme of princes’renewal of martial identity through invocation of their historicalconnection to the landscape and geography through huntingpractices. Using the idea of chronotope, or a landscape imbued withcertain historical significance, Hughes shows that the Princeshunted in chronotopes to enact symbolic freedom and equalityagainst the British.

The fifth and final chapter deals with the internal tensionswithin the princely states in which the princes, their nobles andthe local landlords all compete to hunt game. The chapter alsogives a very useful history of the codification attempts by theBritish of princely hunting practices into rules and regulations,which the princes vigorously resisted in order to keep their

hunting privileges intact all the while appearing to care aboutconservation. If there is any criticism of the book, I think it is inthis final chapter. Hughes portrayal of the political dynamics ofthe princely states presents an image in which all players arepitted against each other e the princes against the nobles, thenobles and princes against the landlords and the land landlordsagainst the peasants, and all of them against the British. It isunclear whether this condition is specific to the time periodunder review in the book when the old pre-colonial and colonialorder was being replaced by a new nationalist and ‘modern’order. If so then it might perhaps have been more clearly stated,otherwise there is a risk that the book might inadvertently sus-tain the colonial discourse that pre-colonial India was chaoticand at risk of disintegrating and could only be kept intact by apaternalistic and disciplinary British Rule. This is of course aminor, or even an unjust criticism of an otherwise wonderful andexcellent book which provides the first comprehensive accountof the intersection of hunting and power in Indian princely statesduring the colonial period.

Shafqat HussainTrinity College, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.014

Michael J. Hathaway. Environmental Winds: Making the Global inSouthwest China. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013,xi þ 258 pages, US$27.95 paperback.

In a highly accessible fashion, anthropologist Michael Hathawayuses research on a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project to conservetropical rainforests in the southern part of China’s Yunnan provinceto shed light on how Yunnan became a global hub of environ-mentalism. The account draws on ethnographic fieldwork in one ofthe project’s ‘model villages,’ Xiao Long, as well as interviews withWWF project staff and Chinese scientists and experts. In telling thestory of environmentalism in Yunnan, Environmental Winds alsojoins works such as Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of GlobalConnection (Princeton, 2005) and Gillian Hart’s Disabling Global-ization: Places of Power in post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley,2002) in arguing that globalization is not something that ‘flows’from nowhere or from the West to China, nor something thatsimply ‘impacts’ local places. Instead, people around the worldagentively and cumulatively make the global through their actions,whether they intend to do so or not.

Environmental Winds is written in parts as a journey of discovery,showing how the author’s initial assumptions, whether aboutglobal environmentalism flowing from the West to China, or ruralpeople resisting the WWF project, turn out to be flawed. Thisnarrative stylewill make it appealing to a broad audience, includingundergraduates in courses on globalization and political ecology.More specialized audiences may occasionally be skeptical, forexample, that the author really thought in 2000 that Xiao Long was‘seemingly beyond the reach of most global forces’ (p. 73).

The arguments are structured around a series of concepts thatHathaway introduces, particularly ‘globalized formations’ (hisalternative to ‘social movements’), ‘environmental winds’, ‘trans-national work’, the ‘art of engagement,’ and ‘indigenous space’.Transnational work, which resonates strongly with Anna Tsing’sanalytics in Friction, names the labor that goes into creating thepossibilities for connection andmaintaining spaces of collaborationthat create the global. The conceptualization of the rise of envi-ronmentalism as a ‘wind’, from the Chinese feng, is by turns

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162 151

ingenious and vague. The metaphor helps us think through Hath-away’s insistence on the unexpected travel of globalized formationsback and forth across national boundaries. Wind productivelysuggests an analytic of ‘transformation, not fixity; a sense of mul-tiplicity, not singularity’ (p. 17). However, he also states, ‘one cannotavoid powerful winds; one must interact with them in some way.Without engagement, winds dissipate’ (p.37), a formulation whichseems less illuminating, if not a bit self-contradictory. Despite theinsistence that winds are social products (while also similar tophysical winds), in English themetaphor of ‘winds’ is not associatedwith labor, which is central to transnational work.

To me the most compelling chapters were those based onHathaway’s long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Xiao Long. Inchapter 5, Hathaway draws on actor-network theory and theconcept of ‘cumulative agency’ to discuss how wild elephantsthemselves played a role in the transnational work of making globalenvironmentalism. Elephants, he shows, agentively shaped thelandscape with their behaviors, which shifted through theirchanging interactions with people. Chapter 3 explores the ‘art ofengagement,’ showing that villagers dealt with new environmentalwinds more by reaching out to and connecting with powerfuloutsidersestate officials and transnational organizationsethan bysimply resisting them. Rather than wish WWF had never arrived,villagers worry about why it left. This engagement changed notonly the villagers, but WWF staff as well.

In his argument about engagement, Hathaway works hard toshow that powerful transnational organizations ‘do not just get toimpose their own plans, and neither do they always work in tan-demwith the state’ (p. 71). I am very sympathetic to this argument,but found myself wishing the analysis of WWF’s arrival and nego-tiations in Yunnan were more strongly grounded in the historicalgeography and political economy of both the region and the orga-nization. Readers do not get much sense of shifting institutionaland bureaucratic alliances within the Chinese state that surely alsoplayed a role in this conjuncture.

Although not a traditional work of historical geography, thebook has much to offer historical geographers interested in globalenvironmentalism and transnational networks reaching out fromAsia. Throughout, Environmental Winds offers refreshing andinformative revisionist views of the collective period in the People’sRepublic. For example, a wonderful picture of an auto-repair classfrom Emeryville, California, in the early 1970swith a Chinese posterin the background effectively makes the point that Mao-era Chinawas not only less isolated than often assumed, but also had a now-forgotten but significant role in shaping global feminism, civilrights, and the Black Power movement. Hathaway also fruitfullydemonstrates the importance of transnational networks that arecentered on Asia rather than the West, highlighting Chinese ex-perts’ training in and exchange with scholars in Indonesia, thePhilippines, and Thailand in the construction of an indigenousspace in China.

Unfortunately the book also omits a key institutional player inthe making of environmentalism in Yunnan. This will not concerna general audience, but those involved in the making of that his-tory may feel differently. Nick Menzies appears in the acknowl-edgements, but his role as the manager of Winrock International’sYunnan Uplands Management (YUM) Program, which played apivotal role in making Yunnan a hub of global environmentalism,is never discussed. Among other things, YUM first sent Xu Jianchuand Yu Xiaogang, who are profiled at length in chapter 4 for theirrole in the creation of indigenous space, to study outside of China.Other key players in Yunnan’s environmental work today alsoparticipated in this program. This erasure might have been born ofa concern about weakening the key argument that environmen-talism and indigeneity did not emerge solely in the Global North,

but rather arose in part within China itself. But I do not think thesehistorical facts call the argument into question. Indeed, YUM wasfunded by the Ford Foundation, which started to work on povertyalleviation at the request of China’s State Council. Instead, showinghow a program focused initially on poverty alleviation fosteredthose who became central to the production of global environ-mentalism would have made the argument about historical con-junctures, collaborations, and engagements all the stronger.

These observations do not detract from the fact that Environ-mental Winds is a well-crafted and lucidly written book. Itsdelightful ethnographic insights and sharp concepts will be of greatvalue in introducing undergraduate and graduate students to newways of thinking about China, globalization, conservation, andenvironmentalism.

Emily T. YehUniversity of Colorado Boulder, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.022

Richard Sorrenson, Perfect Mechanics: Instrument Makers at theRoyal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century. Boston, DocentPress, 2013, ix þ 240 pages, USD$17.99, paperback.

While a book about instrument makers may sound rather technicalfor most historical geographers, it was on instrument makers’expertise and ability to construct appropriate instruments on timeand to budget that many expeditions of survey and discoverydepended. ‘Appropriateness’ encompassed scientific and technicalaspects of instrumentation, but also practical aspects such asportability and ability to withstand use in difficult terrain, on boardship, or in challenging climates. The best instrument makers werenot simple suppliers of products, but men of science, a few beingelected to the Royal Society by the ‘gentlemen’ who admired theirwork. The book under review here, a lightly-updated version ofSorrenson’s 1993 doctoral thesis, addresses themes of centralconcern to geographers: exploration, practice in the field, pro-fessionalising scientific communities and networks, and socialcontexts for knowledge making.

Sorrenson’s introductory pages describe the Royal Society andhow, during the eighteenth century, craftsmen were treated withgreater respect by the gentleman fellows. Production of in-struments became more collaborative, though the wording ofletters and invoices shows that class distinction was maintained.Chapter 2 discusses the Royal Society then and now: its admin-istration, how fellows cultivated their scientific interests, and its‘clubbability’. Tables and an appendix analyse the fellows’ interestsand list the contents of the society’s Philosophical Transactionsbetween 1720 and 1779. The contrast between the craft commu-nities of London and Paris is touched on rather too briefly, sincethe two were very different. The London community, unlike that ofParis, had largely escaped suffocating guild control, and benefitedin its handling of finances: prosperous craftsmen with reserves intheir bank accounts could accept orders for items which wouldtake one or two years to construct. While such items were made,sales of lesser items and repairs generated cash to pay the work-men. Similarly Sorrenson addresses other aspects of instrumentmakers’ lives too briefly to be satisfying. He describes them as‘shopkeepers’, yet the best were highly skilled mechanics whoowned books on mathematical and general works. While leadinginstrument makers might have a shop on a main street, with ashopman to display new and second-hand items, their workshopscould be elsewhere, in one or more premises with good daylight.