Colin Duncan 

Adjunct Associate Professor

E-mail: colin.duncan@queensu.ca
Phone: 613-533-6000, ext: 78811
Fax: 613-533-6298
Office: Watson Hall 129

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Colin Duncan did extensive postgraduate training in the environmental history of political economy at York's Social & Political Thought programme in the 1980s. He started teaching in Queen's History Department in 1987, initially just modern British history, the 'classical' case-study in political economy.

His chief ongoing research focus has always been on the locally variegated customary law regulating (over centuries apparently) the way English capitalist tenant farmers treated the soil belonging to the landlord class, the original and necessary 'ground' of Britain's eventual globally extraordinary accumulations of wealth. His revised dissertation containing a long argument about all that became THE CENTRALITY OF AGRICULTURE: BETWEEN HUMANKIND AND THE REST OF NATURE (McGill-Queen's U.P., Montréal & Kingston, 1996 (xxv + 285 pp.).He still holds by almost all of the arguments in that text, except those concerning the atmosphere about which he is now acutely worried (see below). During a S.S.H.R.C. postdoc' at Queen's, Duncan produced a methodological article "On Identifying a Sound Environmental Ethic in History: Prolegomena to Any Future Environmental History" in ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY REVIEW Volume XV #2 Summer 1991, pp.5-30 (which led in their special issue on ethics and won a prize from the Forest History Society). He also at that time initiated postgraduate training in Canada in environmental history and was the first in Canada to teach general global environmental history to undergraduates.

He routinely co-supervises Canadianists who are doing an environmental topic or angle in their work. He also worked at McGill full-time for a dozen years, teaching in many programmes there at all levels. He also knows Soviet history fairly broadly as his most recent publication indicates: "Afterword: Labelling Events and Selecting Contexts in History" in (Edited by Lubomyr Luciuk) HOLODOMOR: REFLECTIONS ON THE GREAT FAMINE OF 1932-1933 IN SOVIET UKRAINE (Kashtan Press, Kingston, 2008, pp.225-234). To see why Duncan still thinks the 18th century matters look at: "Adam Smith's Green Vision and the Future of Global Socialism" in (Edited by Robert Albritton, Shannon Bell, John R. Bell and Richard Westra) NEW SOCIALISMS: FUTURES BEYOND GLOBALIZATION (Routledge, London, 2004, pp.90-104). Duncan is currently trying to publish a short piece for the general reader: GLOBALIZING THE WAR ECONOMY MODEL AS BEST-CASE FRAMEWORK FOR ACHIEVING MASSIVE REDUCTIONS IN CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS: AN HISTORIAN'S PLEA. Versions of the arguments in this were aired by invitation at R.M.C. and at U.C.Berkeley which latter event led to a fifty minute Radio Pacifica interview archived on the web under their show "Against the Grain" (May 4th,2008).