This is a coherent collection of essays, edited by Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damodaran and Rohan D’Souza, that explicitly serves as a tribute to the pioneering work of Richard Grove—above all his efforts to place the history of environmental change and ecological knowledge in the British Empire into a global framework. It is essentially conceived as a follow-on from the volume Nature and the Orient (1998) edited by Grove, Vinita Damodaran and Satpal Sangwan, which assembled several dozen papers on the environmental history of South Asia and for many years represented the state of the art. As such, it serves a number of purposes: to provide a stock-take of the environmental history of the region, to build on the research programme laid out by Grove (especially the ecological impact of colonial development and the creation of colonial environmental knowledge), and, more broadly, to argue for taking the empire as a useful scale of analysis in environmental history between the constraints of local and regional studies on the one hand and a full-blown global perspective on the other. (HP of Oxford Academic)