List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Edens, islands and early empires; 2. Indigenous knowledge and the significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch constructions of tropical nature; 3. The English and Dutch East India companies and the seventeenth-century environmental crisis in the colonies; 4. Stephen Hales and some Newtonian antecedents of climatic environmentalism, 1700¿1763; 5. Protecting the climate of paradise: Pierre Poivre and the conservation of Mauritius under the ancien regime; 6. Climate, conservation and Carib resistance: the British and the forests of the Eastern Caribbean, 1760¿1800; 7. The beginnings of global environmentalism: professional science, oceanic islands and the East India Company, 1768¿1838; 8. Diagnosing crisis: the East India Company medical services and the emergence of state conservationism in India, 1760¿1857; Conclusion: the colonial state and the origins of western environmentalism; Select bibliography, Index.