The ecology of nations: British imperial sciences of nature, 1895-1945

This thesis focuses on the expansion of ecological research from botanical studies of sand dunes to human ecology within the British Empire. It argues that the correlation between nature's and society's imperial economy—the ecology of nations—was a crucial step in the conceptual and social development of ecological research. Elements of technology, psychology, epistemology, sociology, geography and historiography, as well as the natural sciences, constituted the broad methodological base of ecology. The result was a new ecological order of these ‘sciences of nature’ which could then establish a new order for both society and nature. Two different patronage networks supported the expansion of ecological reasoning: a small one centering around the South African botanist and politician Jan Christian Smuts, and a larger in the north, encompassing a set of British colonial agencies based in England. Both needed tools for understanding human relations to nature and society in order to set administrative economic policies for landscapes, population settlement and social control. With Arthur George Tansley as their main spokesman British ecologists developed a mechanistic view of ecology suitable for creating an administrative system for human and natural resources in the Empire. In the south, Smuts mobilized ecologists such as John Phillips and John William Bews to use his politics of holism to argue for an idealistic ecology that cold solve the Empire's environmental, social and racial problems. The clash between Tansley's ecosystem approach and Phillips' holistic theory of the biotic community was a formative debate which led to two different approaches to how to include humans in ecological research. In the south, Bews and Phillips explored the ecological division of labor in a racially segregated environment, while Smuts used ecological reasoning to write a racist charter for human rights for the United Nations. In the north, Tansley, Charles Elton, Julian Huxley, Max Nicholson, Edgar Worthington, and H. G. Wells promoted a new human ecology based on principles of economic planning, which Huxley tried to implement as Director General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.