Writing on imperial and colonial history has been heavily criticised, initially for its complete ignorance of women as historical subjects and, more recently, for its gender-blind methodology and hence failure to envisage history as a gendered experience.
A deluge of counter histories have been produced in response to these criticisms, some singularly focused on relocating women in history, and others which have examined women in relation to men in specific historical contexts and from diverse theoretical perspectives. Despite the rush to locate ‘lost female worlds’ (Nair 1994), however, gender issues have yet to receive serious attention in work on environmental history. Indeed the growing body of work on the causes and impacts of land use change, and their relationships with imperial and colonial policy and politics, has to date shown remarkably little interest in their gender dimensions.
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