Includes bibliographical references (pages 272-284) and index.

Preface / Anna Winterbottom -- Introduction : new imperial and environmental histories of the Indian Ocean / Alan Lester -- Botanical explorations and the East India Company : revisiting "plant colonialism" / Deepak Kumar -- Medicine and botany in the making of Madras, 1680-1720 / Anna Winterbottom -- Robert Wright and his European botanical collaborators / H.J. Noltie -- The East India Company, famine and ecological conditions in eighteenth-century Bengal / Vinita Damodaran -- Colonial private diaries and their potential for reconstructing historical climate in Bombay, 1799-1828 / George Adamson -- Mischievous rivers and evil shoals : the English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime / Rohan D'Souza -- The Rafflesia in the natural and imperial imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia / Timothy P. Barnard -- "A proper set of views" : the British East India Company and the eighteenth-century visualization of South-East Asia / Geoff Quilley -- Unlikely partners : Malay-Indonesian medicine and European plant science / Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells -- Plants, animals and environmental transformation : Indian-New Zealand biological and landscape connections, 1830s-1890s / James Beattie -- St Helena as a microcosm of the East India Company World / A.T. Grove -- Afterword / Vinita Damodaran.

"The East India Company and the Natural World is the first work to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The EIC both contributed to and recorded environmental change during the first era of globalization. From the small island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, to peninsula India and outposts in South and Southeast Asia, the Company presence profoundly altered the environment by introducing plants and animals, felling forests, and redirecting rivers. The threats of famine and disease encouraged experiments with agriculture and the recording of the virtues of medicinal plants. The EIC records of the weather, the soils, and the flora provide modern climate scientists with invaluable data. The contributors - drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - use the lens of the Company to illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857. "-- Provided by publisher.