Content: Frameworks, Introduction. 1. Forest Products in a Wider World: Early Historic Connections in Southern India. 2. Historicizing Adaptation, Adapting to History: Forager-traders in South and Southeast Asia. 3. Environmental History, the Spice Trade, and the State in South India. 4. Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock: Narratives of Balance, Loss and Degradation. FORAGERS. Introduction. 5. Historicizing Foraging in South Asia: Power, History, and Ecology of Holocene Hunting and Gathering. 6. Coercion, Resistance, and Hierarchy: Local Processes and Imperial Strategies in the Vijayanagara Empire. 7. Inventing the Primitive Isolate: Imperial Margins and Anthropological Misrecognitions. 8. Christians and Spices: Hidden Foundations and Misrecognitions in European Colonial Expansion to South Asia. FORESTS. Introduction. 9. Losing Primeval Forests: Degradation Narratives in South Asia. 10. Constructing Nature: Socionatural Histories of an Indian Forest. SOCIONATURES. Introduction. 11. Naturalizing Disaster: From Drought to Famine in Southern India. 12. Risky Business: Rice and Intercolonial Dependencies in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. 13. Provincializing the Anthropocene: Eurocentrism in the Earth System. 14. Empires as Ecosystem Engineers: Towards a Non-Binary Political Ecology. Afterword. Index.