Providing an overview of the ecological dimension of economic processes, this book presents a framework for understanding the relations between ecosystems and world systems. It also contains reflections by Immanuel Wallerstein, originator of the world-system concept, in which he talks about the various implications of global environmental change.

Introduction: Environmental History as Political Ecology Part I The Environment in World-System History: Tracing Social Processes in Nature 1. Environmental Impacts of the Roman Economy and Social Structure: Augustus to Diocletian 2. "People Said Extinction Was Not Possible": Two Thousand Years of Environmental Change in South China 3. Precolonial Landesque Capital: A Global Perspective 4. Food, War, and Crisis: The Seventeenth-Century Swedish Empire 5. The Role of Deforestation in Earth and World-System Integration 6. Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640 7. Trade, "Trinkets," and Environmental Change at the Edge of World-Systems: Political Ecology and the East African Ivory Trade 8. Steps to an Environmental History of the Western Llanos of Venezuela: A World-System Perspective 9. The Extractive Economy: An Early Phase of the Globalization of Diet, and Its Environmental Consequences 10.Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1640-1830 Part II Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Unraveling Environmental Injustice in the Modern World 11. Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade 12. Natural Values and the Physical Inevitability of Uneven Development under Capitalism 13. Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement 14. Uneven Ecological Exchange and Consumption-Based Environmental Impacts: A Cross-National Investigation 15. Combining Social Metabolism and Input-Output Analyses to Account for Ecologically Unequal Trade 16. Physical Trade Flows of Pollution-Intensive Products: Historical Trends in Europe and the World 17. Environmental Issues at the U.S.-Mexico Border and the Unequal Territorialization of Value 18. Surrogate Money, Technology, and the Expansion of Savanna Soybeans in Brazil 19. Scale and Dependency in World-Systems: Local Societies in Convergent Evolution 20. The Ecology and the Economy: What is Rational?

The contributors to Rethinking Environmental History argue for a truly global, historical, and transdisciplinary approach to environmental history, even when analyzing the most localized instances of degradation. They show how and why environmental degradations have been uneven throughout history—and in the process employ, critique, and extend world-systems analysis.