Historians don't often take their cues from Goldman Sachs. Occasionally, however, the economic gaze of multinational investment banking produces insights into trends of political economy that can open new avenues of historical inquiry. Such is the case with a grouping of the seemingly disparate nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) identified around 2001 by Goldman Sachs as an emerging collective force in an integrated global economy defined primarily by the growth of capital. Representing nearly 20 percent of global GDP and presenting themselves as the world's largest market, BRICS have recognized their common objectives and shared position in the global economy since as early as 2009. Perhaps naturally, this convergence of interest has led historians to grapple with how to understand this confluence in light of what appear to be quite disparate historical experiences. In their 2018 edited collection The Great Convergence: Environmental Histories of BRICS, S. Ravi Rajan and Lise Sedrez pick up on this effort, focusing specifically on the category of environment in order to understand the threads of environmental policy and politics that have carried over from the past to help define the present-and perhaps the global environmental future. Despite historical differences in the state structure and traditions of civil discourse that have shaped environmental policies and philosophies within these nations, Rajan and Sedrez contend that the common objectives and converging futures of BRICS offer an opportunity to think in new ways about environmental history that conjoin and confound the familiar East-West and North-South binaries that tend to dominate twentieth-century environmental histories.
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