Histories in, of and for more-than-human worlds

This chapter examines emerging approaches in environmental history that engage with interdisciplinary more-than-human and multispecies scholarship. These more-than-human histories point towards new and possible modes of historical, and indeed wider scholarly, analysis. We contextualise these engagements within broader changes in environmental history since its emergence as a self-conscious sub-discipline in the 1970s, including responses to the growth of the relatively new field of environmental humanities within which more-than-human approaches have flourished. We argue that while more-than-human scholarship and environmental history present some challenges to each other, there are opportunities for both to further enrich their approaches through deeper and sustained dialogue with each other. Here, we outline an established approach to ‘more-than-human histories’ and describe how it can be further extended through an attentiveness to processes of multispecies ‘worlding’ and ‘the arts of noticing’ in historical methods and analysis. We then provide two case studies of more-than-human histories from our own research.