"What an extraordinary case study. . . . Kavita Philip shows how in a colonial world every aspect, including the environment, becomes a contested space. Readable and insightful, it is the perfect investigation for any class from colonial studies to environmental studies to the history of science and technology."-Sander L. Gilman, director, Humanities Laboratory, University of Illinois-Chicago

"Civilizing Natures is a first-rate study. Philip has done an excellent job of demonstrating the significance of the cultural critique of science for scholars and students interested in postcolonial theory, ecology, Indian history, and nineteenth-century political economies."-Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Science was a central pillar of colonialism, but the converse holds true as well: colonialism profoundly shaped the character of nineteenth-century science. Civilizing Natures unravels unexpected relationships between science, technology, and administrative systems in colonial India from the 1850s to the 1930s, deepening our perspective on continuing conflicts over race, resources, and empire.

Botanists, anthropologists, and foresters had their most important sources of data-nature and natives-located at colonial sites. In the hilly, forested regions of Madras Presidency, tribal populations were studied by ethnographers, managed by revenue officials, recruited by plantation contractors, and modernized by missionaries. Racial constructions of nature and modernity helped criminalize and domesticate unruly natives. This is a story about the construction of nature in southern India that is deeply local and irreducibly global.

Through detailed case studies, Kavita Philip shows how race and nature are fundamental to understanding colonial modernities. Through its insightful combination of methodologies from both the humanities and the social sciences, Civilizing Natures complicates our understandings of the relationships between science and religion, pre-modern and civilized, environment and society.

Kavita Philip is an associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Going Native: Cyberculture and Millennial Fantasies of Globalization and co-editor of Competing Universalisms: Refounding Human Rights in an Age of Globalization.