In recent years, environmental history has taken an interest in wars and mass violence. Significant work has been done on the environmental history of the Holocaust (Jacek Leociak, Ewa Domanska, Tim Cole etc.). Other researchers from various disciplines have examined the question of nature and landscape in relation to the world wars (Annette Becker), to the Armenian genocide (Anouche Kunth), the Gulag (Luba Jurgenson, Geneviève Piron), etc.The role played by landscapes in the construction of national imaginations, memories and cultures is well known. In my paper, I'd like to address the question of border landscapes, which throughout history have experienced different strata of violence, each of which has left its mark on the landscape.The events that have marked these landscapes are part of a cross-cultural, multilingual history/memory that resists linear construction. With this in mind, I would like to explore the possible intersections between, on the one hand, global history and, on the other, the environmental history of mass violence, approached through the question of landscape.

Many associate the extinction of wild South China tigers with the "Four Pests" campaign in the 1950s under the Communist regime that reduced their population from 4,000 to 200 within two decades. However, the provenance of this campaign traces back to a much more distant past. This paper concerns the specific life experiences of humans and tigers in the borderlands, specifically in the Wuling mountain area in Southwest China, a place historically governed by independent tributary kingdoms (tusi) until annexed by the Qing state in the 1730s. I argue that from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, an evolving governmentality of the Chinese state, increasingly antagonistic and intolerant towards Armed Non-State Actors (ANSAs), programmed the elimination of non-state spaces in the Southwest Wuling borderlands, consequently obliterating the culture and knowledge of tolerance towards tigers. The expansion of the modern state is not only territorial, administrative, and extractive but also marked by the ascendancy of a state mentality over a borderland mentality. As elusive and perhaps “anti-human” as tigers are, they evade precise documentation, which is a technology of statecraft that did not concern the non-state borderlands. The expansion of a modern state saw the consolidation of a monopoly of violence through knowledge disciplines to manage both humans and animals as populations. Concurrently, the rising primacy of modern science mapped anthropogenic territorial imaginations onto the different tigers globally —Javanese, Balinese, South Chinese, Siberian, Bengali, Caspian— indigenizing species that dispersed across East and Southeast Asia two million years ago.

This paper discusses the expansion of railways in the western parts of India (c. 1860-1870) in the context of the global environmental history of large infrastructures. It draws upon techno-social approaches for understanding the global spread of infrastructural designs for railways as embedded in local technologies, materials and skills. Following this approach, infrastructures form a web through societies, building upon geological formations, locally and globally available materials, combined with skills, labour and knowledge. Infrastructures do not only facilitate mobility, but they are also relational as a mutual constitutive power of the social and technological. Focusing on environmental conditions and resources, the paper explores implications of infrastructure’s power to re-organize social, political, economic, and ecological life in relation to livelihoods in a colonial context. The railways in India are instrumentally and intrinsically linked to the export of raw materials, and specifically cotton in the 1860s, as several important works in economic and agrarian history outline. The implementation of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR) facilitated global trade by connecting trade routes between Bombay and Calcutta, and simultaneously it changed circulation and access to local resources and environments. The paper’s focus is on the impact of the railways on landscapes and social interactions, specifically how it is intertwined with access to water and natural resources.