India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh contain one-fifth of humanity, are home to many biodiversity hotspots, and are among the nations most subject to climatic stresses. By surveying their environmental history, we can gain major insights into the causes and implications of the Indian subcontinent's current conditions. This accessible new survey begins roughly 100 million years ago, when continental drift moved India from the South Pole and across the Indian Ocean, forming the Himalayan Mountains and creating monsoons. Coverage continues to the twenty-first century, taking readers beyond independence from colonial rule. The new nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have produced rising populations and have stretched natural resources, even as they have become increasingly engaged with climate change. To understand the region's current and future pressing issues, Michael H. Fisher argues that we must engage with the long and complex history of interactions among its people, land, climate, flora, and fauna.

This book surveys and analyses the range of Indians that ventured to Britain over 250 years, their reasons for travel, their diverse lived experiences, and their contrasting representations of colonizer, colonized, and colonial rule. Written in lucid and jargon-free prose, this volume will enthrall general readers as well as historians. Its strong interest in narrative and the telling anecdote, in individual personalities and peculiar lives, makes this book unusually appealing as much for its incredible wealth of new data and fresh arguments, as for its accessibility.