The early nineteenth-century extinction of Franklinia alatamaha is quite possibly the first species loss recorded on American soil. Yet few scholars have included the plant within American dialogues on extinction. Because it continued to be cultivated in gardens after it was extinct in the wild, its story contradicts the traditional declension and ascension narratives, and so opens a new lens into the understanding of scientific ideas about environmental change. Beginning with William Bartram’s collection of the species at the end of the eighteenth century, and ending with Edgar Wherry’s ecologically informed searches for surviving Franklinia in the early twentieth century, this essay examines botanists who believed Franklinia might still grow naturally a century after its last sighting. Their rediscovery expeditions reveal a value in species wildness, even while acknowledging its habitat was not wilderness. This history extends extinction stories beyond animal species, to illuminate the origins of understandings of species loss through the voices and actions of botanists whose practice of propagation saved this species, but whose imaginations still wishfully envisioned Franklinia in the wild.

After the Second World War, colonial veterinary services, entrepreneurs, and African villagers in French Equatorial Africa (AEF) began to raise cattle in regions where this had been deemed impossible because of the threat of African animal trypanosomiasis. The opening of this new pastoral frontier in the humid savannas of Central Africa was not only a challenging logistical operation, involving the purchase, transport, and acclimatization of thousands of trypanotolerant animals. It also hinged on the mobilization of various forms of expertise, from veterinary medicine to soil science, important financial investments, and the participation of rural Africans. The article argues that the specific conditions in postwar AEF generated a frontier that was distinct from many other global and African cattle frontiers, as it was driven more by late-colonial development ideas and funds than capitalist expansion, even if these were sometimes entangled. Shaped by the interplay between local, (trans)imperial, and globally circulating knowledge, trypanotolerant cattle production in the AEF took the complementary forms of extensive ranching and small-scale peasant production. Although the introduction of trypanotolerant cattle triggered new conflicts, it was further pursued by postcolonial states, transforming rural economies and ecologies.

This article questions a popular narrative of how the Little Ice Age (LIA) shaped the modern world. In that narrative, a cold phase of the LIA in Europe from around 1560 to 1630 caused crises that Europeans conceptualized in premodern terms. To them, a wrathful God was angry at human sin. As a remedy, they scapegoated and persecuted certain groups of people. Those mentalities and actions, the narrative holds, later gave way to more enlightened ones as societies developed better mechanisms for mitigating the effects of climate. In contrast to that account, the following case study demonstrates that central Europeans in the Duchy of Württemberg had a more complex conception of climate and even maintained that their region was blessed by God over the first three decades of this era, from 1560 to 1590. These findings advance new research directions in the field of the history of climate and society. The article models a multiscalar methodology for discovering and analyzing the causal mechanisms mediating between climate and human societies. Uncoupling the LIA in Europe from a narrative of global modernization allows for more accurate and more needed climate histories.

This article argues that environmental historians could enrich the postcolonial history of Africa by taking a more central role in narrating the major events of the recent past. It makes the case for this by considering the effects of the oil crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, which has generally been discussed as a transnational political and economic event and has remained peripheral to writing the history of African states, cities, and communities. Yet, by decimating the foreign exchange budgets of non-oil-producing nations, the crisis required reimagining how nations and families provisioned resources for the economy and their lives. Using Tanzania as an example, it explores the ways in which local resources and a new push for South-South cooperation replaced imported raw materials and, more generally, paradigms of development predicated on the continued cheap price of petroleum. This reterritorializing of the future was both an ideological and practical act, as Tanzanians shifted from the horizons of postwar developmentalism to navigating profound scarcity and considering how smaller-scale technologies and intense use of local resources might help sever dependencies on the West.

Between 1868 and 1908, French activity in Iraq was increasingly shaped by questions of water management in the southern reaches of the Tigris-Euphrates valley and prevailing ideas about the region’s ostensibly limitless potential for commercial agriculture. Specifically, French entrepreneurs and officials advocated for the introduction of steamships on the Tigris and Euphrates and the mobilization of French technocratic expertise in hydraulic engineering to modernize these rivers. In doing so, they hoped to increase France’s influence in Iraq (and the west Indian Ocean more broadly) by competing with British steamships and by responding to Ottoman priorities focused on developing agriculture in Iraq. Thus, the story of French environmental engineering on the Tigris-Euphrates demonstrates that France employed hydroimperialist practices not just at home and in its colonies but also in the unlikely noncolonial setting of Iraq to expand its influence abroad, albeit through informal methods.