As the Spanish empire expanded, the growing abundance of horses elevated an underlying tension between two colonial goals: to populate land with horses bred in new settlements, and to control land in new settlements by regulating the movement, reproduction, and possession of horses in them. The horse population increased due to both evolutionary environmental affinities and the use of traditional husbandry methods, such as loose herd management and protection of the commons, which had some unintended consequences. The responses of Spanish and Indigenous actors to these changes presented opportunities to negotiate the perception of and exercise of Spanish imperial power in a new equine political ecology.

By 1624, 'through the injury of time and weather', George Montaigne reported, 'there had a general wrack befallen the ancient parish church of St. Giles in the Fields'. The temporal decline of monuments is a common early modern theme, but Montaigne’s indictment of weather’s ill-effects suggests an awareness of the period of climatic change now known as the Little Ice Age. Rather than arguing that climate determined the fate of monuments, this chapter looks beyond cause and effect to describe an interconnection between memory, climate, and mortality as played out in the memorial network created by Alice, Duchess Dudley, and her five daughters. This chapter recovers material and memorial connections joining the Dudley women’s memory work in an ecology that situates the church building and its monuments within a web of social, somatic, and climatic conditions in which these women lived and died. Mobilizing climate as an agent in, rather than a mere a backdrop to, memorial activities redirects the Dudley women’s project from familiar devotional and monumental gestures towards a wider field of social values that both led and responded to environmental changes on a global scale.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the world became far more interconnected than it had been before. The Portuguese connected with the existing rich trading network of the Indian Ocean, and, in response, the Spanish monarchs agreed in 1492 to provide financial backing for Columbus. Other mariners supported by other European monarchs also began to explore the coasts of the “New World” and establish colonies. European voyages, trading ventures, and colonization had a wide range of impacts. In Asia, existing trading networks, traditions, and structures of power changed relatively little. In Africa, the slave trade began to expand, which encouraged warfare, siphoned off workers, and destroyed kinship groups. In the Americas, European diseases eventually killed the vast majority of the Indigenous population. The Spanish set up plantations, built churches, and mined precious metals, using enslaved Americans and Africans. Gold and silver mined in the Americas fueled global trading connections. Increased contacts with Africa, Asia, and the Americas led Europeans to develop new ideas about difference and hierarchy that built on earlier notions and involved religion, social standing, ethnicity, and skin color. Overseas conquests gave Europe new territories and sources of wealth, and also new confidence in its technical and spiritual supremacy.

In 1532 a motley band of 168 Spanish soldiers arrived on the outskirts of Cajamarca, the capital of the mighty Incan empire in present-day Peru. Already on his third expedition to the New World, Francisco Pizarro had one aim: to find gold and claim it for the Spanish king. He first sent his trusted captain, Hernando de Soto, to meet with the In can emperor – Atahualpa – and invite him to a meeting. De Soto rode out on his horse. It was the first time Atahualpa had ever seen such an animal. Impressed with his strange visitor, he agreed to meet Pizarro the next day.

Pizarro, however, had different plans. He prepared an ambush and, when Atahualpa arrived with 6,000 unarmed men, he attacked with 106 soldiers on foot and 62 on horses. The Incas were completely caught off guard; about 2,000 Inca died in the volleys of gunfire that ensued.

Discusses the Carolingian empire within the context of historical empires that altered the composition and populations of plants within their territories.

Chapter 1 introduces the basic patterns in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico’s energy regime. After a brief overview of Mexico’s longer history, it presents a panoramic view of Mexican society in the 1850s and analyzes the relationship between economic activity, environmental conditions, and the country’s energy regime, which depended on the annual solar cycle. It sketches the basic contours of Mexico’s pre–fossil fuel era, providing a baseline against which the social, economic, and environmental developments examined in subsequent chapters can be gauged.

The expansion of trade and colonial conquest in the early modern era propelled the potato around the world, but the processes that made it a global staple reflect not only these forces but also the varied circumstances that it encountered on its travels. European colonisers congratulated themselves on bringing the nutritious potato to the supposedly backward inhabitants of Bengal and Botany Bay, and viewed its adoption as an index of the overall level of civilisation attained by locals. For gardeners in Tehran, Māori entrepreneurs in New Zealand, and Bengali villagers, potatoes served other purposes. The transformation of eating habits that followed the global dissemination of American foodstuffs after 1492 reveals the complex interactions between local environments, patterns of agriculture and landholding, commercial structures and existing foodways. The potato’s changing status in China demonstrates this well. For centuries the potato provided an important resource for villagers in peripheral regions, yet was almost invisible to the state. Now it is part of a state strategy to increase food security. This transformation in the potato’s political role coincides with the Chinese state’s embrace of the market economy; vigorous state promotion of potatoes has accordingly emphasised individual choice and personal benefit. In China, as in Europe, capitalism, individualism and personal eating practices are closely intertwined with modern forms of statecraft.