"Contemporary Belize is often described as a "pristine" ecotourism destination, a landscape that is now understood as "naturally" valuable. Yet, less than 100 years ago, when British historian Aldous Huxley recounted his travels through the Caribbean and Mexico, he described British Honduras-contemporary Belize-as the unprofitable end of the colonial world: a small population living on a densely forested landscape haunted by the remnants of already evanesced industries in logwood, mahogany, and chicle. It was, he said, "a strange little fragment of the empire" that was of "no strategic value." In marking British Honduras as a forgotten "fragment," Huxley, and many commentators since, have positioned Belize, and its experience of colonialism and its aftermath, as the exception. Patrick M. Gallagher argues that Belize is not an exception: its fragmentary relationship to empire is emblematic of how colonialism worked, or failed to work, and how the colonial nature of the Anthropocene environment, visible and valuable now at the moment of its presumed disappearance, came into being here and around the world. Drawing upon a decade of ethnographic research experience with residents and policy makers of coastal Belize, he explores how precarious Anthropocene environments become sites of capitalist value production. Moving ethnographically between everyday coastal life, emergent ecological science, and spaces of climate policy, the book describes how new technocratic tools for valuing nature are made through landscapes with long histories of racialized colonialism"-- Provided by publisher.