Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

Overarching perspectives notwithstanding, entanglements between human agency and ecological change are best reconstructed on a regional level, for places where archives of nature and actual archives of society are located in spatial proximity. The COE can here contribute various case studies from quite different, but equally challenging ecological settings, where traditions of economic utilisation of landscapes formed, but also were formed by regional practices of power (Mikhail 2017; Lander 2021). At the same time, local communities were integrated into wide-ranging imperial formations and trans-regional networks of mobility and exchange, which in turn entailed new demands, new crops and new technologies. These transfers and innovations, however, in the middle or long run sometimes had unintended ecological consequences similar to those of modern globalisation. Imported and adapted agricultural practices could make communities more vulnerable to climate change or to pathogens spreading from and between animals and humans. Modified demands, preferences of consumption and methods of production increased dependencies on networks of exchange and sensitivity vis-à-vis their disruption (Boivin et al. 2017).