Modernizing Nature: Forestry and imperial eco-development 1800 1950, by S. Ravi Rajan
本书研究欧洲科学如何影响英帝国殖民林业政策，分析科学家的意识形态及其对自然和原住民的态度，分为19世纪和20世纪两部分。
The German model of scientific forestry reduced continental Europe's eighteenth-century timber shortages and produced steady, reliable supplies of wood by the mid-nineteenth century. ‘Little wonder’, James Scott observed in Seeing Like a State in 1998, ‘that the German model of intensive commercial forestry became standard throughout the world’ (p. 19). Little wonder, also, that S. Ravi Rajan, in Modernizing Nature, should emphasize the role of European-trained forest scientists in guiding forestry policies in the British colonial empire. Rajan's study of the place of the sciences in the development of colonial environmental policy is guided by three lines of inquiry: (1) understanding the European origins of these sciences; (2) identifying the ‘ideological orientation of these sciences’, especially the ‘attitudes concerning nature and toward indigenous populations’ (p. 6); and (3) exploring the differences in attitudes between scientists and the rest of colonial society. The author divides the book into two historically delimited parts, the first dealing with the nineteenth century and the second with the twentieth. In the first part, Rajan pursues a ‘revisionist historical examination’ (p. 19) of British colonial forestry, focusing on the development of science in relation to European environmental conditions. In the second part, he uses ‘content analysis’ (p. 20) to study the documents of the Empire Forestry Conferences, held periodically to coordinate British colonial forest policies and exchange scientific knowledge.