Transimperial historians have distinguished their work from traditional imperial histories by pushing beyond the deeply rooted national tendency to focus empirical research and conceptual questions on one single empire. Transimperial historians systematically foreground relationships between and across empires and their governments, peoples, and spaces, studying a range of connectivities and documenting patterns of both competition and cooperation. In exploring such connections between and across empires, however, this emerging field has encountered conceptual questions about chronology and the limits of the transimperial approach in environmental history. These two linked panels explore these issues by bringing together historians who specialize in a range of pre-modern and early modern periods for the former and whose works are at the cutting edge of new environmental histories for the latter.

A distinguishing feature of transimperial history is the systematic foregrounding of relationships between and across empires and their governments, peoples, and spaces, studying a range of connectivities and documenting patterns of both competition and cooperation. But how do such relationships and patterns of competition and cooperation apply to environmental or non-human centered histories? How do we deal with non-human actors and vectors of history, such as winds or currents acting across empires? While some scholars emphasize the impact of non-human species and actors on history, the rise of environmental humanities in recent years has taken a broadly interdisciplinary approach to address the relevance of human action on the environment and the intensifying impact of climate change on societies. This roundtable aims to bring these approaches and fields into conversation to discuss the transimperial in environmental history. Peter Lavelle will use the establishment of conservation efforts in twentieth century China to discuss the formation of public knowledge about conservation. Shellen Wu turns to the issue of border crossing knowledge networks in the history of energy. Yuting Dong will explore infrastructure as “more-than-human,” as infrastructure building often involves a constant conversation between technological aspirations and the physical reality in Northeast Asia. Nadin Heé will discuss more than human aspects in transimperial histories of resource extraction and sovereignty disputes in the Pacific.