Environment, power, and injustice : a South African history / Nancy J. Jacobs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jacobs, Nancy Joy, author.

Series:

Studies in environment and history.

Studies in environment and history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human ecology--South Africa--Kuruman--History.

Human ecology.

Kuruman (South Africa)--Social conditions.

Kuruman (South Africa).

Kuruman (South Africa)--Economic conditions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxi, 300 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Environment, Power, & Injustice

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book presents the socio-environmental history of black people around Kuruman, on the edge of the Kalahari in South Africa. Considering successive periods - Tswana agropastoral chiefdoms before colonial contact, the Cape frontier, British colonial rule, Apartheid, and the homeland of Bophuthatswana in the 1980s - Environment, Power and Injustice shows how the human relationship with the environment corresponded to differences of class, gender, and race. While exploring biological, geological, and climatological forces in history, this book argues that the challenges of existence in a semidesert arose more from human injustice than from deficiencies in the natural environment. In fact, powerful people drew strength from and exercised their power over others through the environment. At the same time, the natural world provided marginal peoples with some relief from human injustice.

Contents:

Approaching Kuruman

Goat people and Fish people on the agro-pastoral frontier, c. 1750-1830

Intensification and social innovation on the Cape frontier, 1820's-1884

Colonial annexation: land alienation and environmental administration, 1884-1894

Environmental trauma, colonial rule, and the failure of extensive food production, 1895-1903

The environmental history of a "labor reservoir," 1903-1970s

Apportioning water, dividing land: segregation, 1910-1977

Betterment and the Bophuthatswana donkey massacre: the environmental rights of tribal subjects, 1940s-1983

Retrospectives on socio-environmental history and socio-environmental justice.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-13273-8

1-280-16113-2

0-511-06453-5

0-511-12030-3

0-511-20413-2

0-511-30695-4

0-511-51198-1

0-511-07299-6

OCLC:

252482176