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BOOK REVIEW 
 

An Environmental Basis for Comparing different 
Histories and Experiences 
 

Lanukumla Ao  
 
S. Ravi Rajan and Lise Sedrez (eds.). 2018. The Great Convergence: 
Environmental Histories of BRICS, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 
ISBN: 9780199479375; pp. 462, INR 1195 
 

The edited volume under review is an 
interesting and unique academic exercise. 
The Great Convergence follows from 
the efforts of 16 historians and social 
scientists in writing a meaningful 
environmental history of BRICS. The 
acronym refers to five major emerging 
economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China 
and South Africa that together comprise 
a geo-political association. The term 
BRICS was first coined in 2001 by Jim 
O’Neil, the then chairman of Goldman 
Sachs; arguably one of the most 
powerful multinational investment 
banks in the world today. The idea for 
the BRICS took off after 2009 ─  given 
the obvious strategic allure for uniting 

economies that have 41% of the world population and make-up 32% of the 

 
 Assistant Professor, Department of History, Don Bosco College, Kohima 797001, 
Nagaland; longchar_akumla@yahoo.com. 

Copyright © Ao 2019. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 
International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.64  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.64


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [156] 

World’s Gross Domestic Product in 2015. But forging and sustaining  unity 
among these nations is no easy challenge given that they are not only 
diverse culturally, environmentally and politically, but are also 
geographically far parts of different continents. Or as plainly remarked in 
the introduction by the editors S. Ravi Rajan and Lise Sedrez, ‘countries 
with very little in common as far as history goes’ (p.xv).  

Admirably enough, the 16 essays that comprise the volume do manage to 
make a  compelling and sometimes even convincing case for how the 
environment can become the ground for establishing  a conceptual linkage 
for comparison across different  histories and experiences. The book is 
divided into three broad themes: the state; the role of civil society; and, 
environmental histories. The first part explores how the respective states 
and their governments have dealt with the notion of nature and engaged 
with ideas of environmental conservations or preservation.  The authors – 
Regina Horta Duarte (Brazil), Paul Josephson (Russia), S. Ravi Rajan 
(India), Xueqin Mei (China), and William Beinart (South Africa) give a fairly 
detailed account of how environment policies were steadily formulated as 
part of state strategies to either exploit or conserve natural resources. The 
essays by Josephson and Mei are particularly instructive with regard to how 
communist governments thought about the natural world despite Marxist 
ideological blinkers and the urgency for development. The authors in this 
section do also attempt to engage with each other’s essays and one also 
notes how the respective governments draw upon international contexts 
such as the Stockholm Conference of 1972 and the Rio Conference of 1992 
to elaborate state-level responses to the problems of environmental 
degradation and alarm.     

On the second theme, dealing with civil society organizations (CSOs), the 
contributions by José Augusto Padua (Brazil), Nicolai Dronin (Russia), 
Radhika Krishnan (India), Fei Sheng (China), and Farieda Khan (South 
Africa) helpfully map the distinct social contexts for environmental action. 
Khan’s excellent discussion tells us how CSOs in South Africa in the 
apartheid era (1948-94) pursued wildlife protection as an element of racial 
segregation. While some of the CSOs did challenge the racial divide, it was 
only in the post-apartheid period that a more ‘people-centric’ notion of 
conservation was developed. Krishnan’s essay draws upon a vast canvas of 
how Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), popular resistance, 
academicians and popular science initiatives combined to create a vibrant 
and forceful mood for environmental protection in India during the 1970s 
through to 2000. At heart, she informs us, these ‘multiple voices’ underlined 
the need to meaningfully define notions about ‘progress’ and ‘development’. 
Sheng’s discussion on the role of Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) and 



[157] Lanukumla Ao 

Government NGOs (GONGOs) in China reveals how complicated and yet 
hopeful the problems of achieving conservation outcomes can be under a 
communist government.   

In the third theme, Lise Sedrez and Eunice Nodari (Brazil), Julia Lajus 
(Russia), S. Ravi Rajan and Rohan D’Souza (India), Shen Hou (China) and 
Sandra Swart (South Africa) provide a broad survey approach to outline the 
state of environmental history as an academic field in their respective 
countries.  Here, I would commend the essay of Shen Hou for both her 
literary style and thoughtful discussion. We learn how environmental 
history writing in China was substantially driven and inspired by the works 
of environmental historians in the United States. Notably, the seminal 
efforts of Donald Worster. Interestingly, once the environmental history 
takes off in China at the turn of the 21st century, Hou informs us that 
several Chinese scholars begin to reverse the academic gaze by researching 
and publishing on the environmental histories of the United States, Europe 
and even the Pacific regions of Australia and New Zealand. As a historian 
located in Nagaland, such a perspectival shift by Chinese scholars is 
particularly telling as the environmental history of the Northeast region of 
India, with the exception of Assam, continues to remain meagre.   

Sadly, the limitations of space prevent us from providing a more detailed 
discussion of the many insights, perspectives and concepts that these essays 
throw up, and therefore in this very brief review one can only conclude by 
restating that such a collection deserves a larger engagement and that it will 
make for excellent teaching material for college and university students. As 
almost all the authors maintain, the future of the environmental history 
writing has many good reasons to go beyond the limitations of national 
histories.  

 


