Making Places and Making States

The environmental dimensions of South Asian history have attracted a great deal of attention in the last decade or so, with the result that we now have a greatly improved understanding of, for example, the ecological as well as social and political consequences of European colonialism and the continuing impact of differential power relations on both people and local landscapes. Not only has this scholarship been useful for putting contemporary resource struggles and ecological crises in broader perspective, but also has added to our understandings of the relations between local environmental conditions and both local and supralocal politics and economics. Building on these insights, I focus here on the connections between the very local constitution (or making) of places, culturally meaningful locales, and the establishment and maintenance of larger political-economic orders, what we may call making states. At both local and larger scales, ideas about what natural resources are, as well as the specifics of their exploitation, create conditions of possibility for social and political orders. At the same time, local landscapes may be radically altered by the demands of states; over the long term, these complex and imbricated relationships create novel environmental conditions that continue to affect human livelihoods into the present.