Identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 ce: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. This book considers each of these trends in a series of case studies.

List of Maps List of Tables Preface Introduction Part I. The Global Context 1. The Early Modern World 2. Climate and Early Modern World Environmental History Part II. Eurasia and Africa 3. Pioneer Settlement on Taiwan 4. Internal Frontiers and Intensified Land Use in China 5. Ecological Strategies in Tokugawa Japan 6. Landscape Change and Energy Transformation in the British Isles 7. Frontier Settlement in Russia 8. Wildlife and Livestock in South Africa Part III. The Americas 9. The Columbian Exchange: The West Indies 10. Ranching, Mining, and Settlement Frontiers in Colonial Mexico 11. Sugar and Cattle in Portuguese Brazil 12. Landscapes of Sugar in the Antilles Part IV. The World Hunt 13. Furs and Deerskins in Eastern North America 14. The Hunt for Furs in Siberia 15. Cod and the New World Fisheries 16. Whales and Walruses in the Northern Oceans Conclusion Bibliography Index

"The Unending Frontier brings into focus the staggering environmental changes that came with the creation of the early modern world economy. John Richards assembles material from all around the world into a crisp and coherent picture of the meaning of global markets for the biosphere in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. This is a work of the first importance for environmental history, for economic history, and for world history."—John R. McNeill, author of Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World"A landmark book. Richards moves deftly among various ways of thinking about the early modern environment—national case studies, studies of particular industries, and reflections on increasing global interconnections—so that we get not only a wealth of important data and stories, but multiple perspectives on the topic as a whole. Both the breadth and the depth of the project are inspiring: people will learn new things about environmental change, even in their regions of specialization. But the biggest payoff is in the way Richards weaves environmental change into more familiar early modern stories of global trade, colonialism, technological change, and, above all, state formation. None of these topics will ever look quite the same again."—Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

“Richards steers a calm course between these extremes [of the catastrophic and the celebratory view of environmental history], but it is as clear from his choice of examples as from his language that he inclines more to the celebratory than the apocalyptic view. . . . Richards advances beyond a purely Eurocentric approach to the dynamics of change and presents the frontier as an evolving, interactive process influenced by both human and non-human factors. That is no mean achievement.”