Rhetoric and practice of scientific agriculture in northern British America, 1670-1820

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250-272)."Planting Improvement: The Rhetoric and Practice of Scientific Agriculture in Northern British America, 1670-1820," explores the history and cultural politics of environmental change in the British empire through a focus on rural land-use practices and the construction of scientific expertise in the cold temperate colonies of New England and Nova Scotia, from the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. Improvement was an abiding mode of and justification for British imperialism through territorial expansion and early modern economic development. British American and anglophone colonists of a range of status positions embraced agricultural improvement, though to different degrees and in different ways. For all settler-farmers, improving extra-European land meant transforming native environments into neo-European agricultural landscapes that were aesthetically familiar. For elites in northern North America, agricultural improvement was additionally a science of the practical Enlightenment, which encompassed husbandry and horticulture, stadial theories of progress, and the objectives and methods of natural history, geography, and economic survey. By exchanging farming advice, botanical literature, and seeds, plants, and livestock with other naturalists and improvers in the republic of letters and scientific institutions in the region as well in England, Scotland, Sweden, Russia, and France, elites in New England and Nova Scotia took a uniquely scientific approach to colonial property development. By employing the rhetoric of science and flaunting their privileged access to transatlantic, European, and imperial networks, northern elites who formed agricultural societies, supported natural history professorships, and private, academic, or colonial botanical gardens, distinguished their land improvements from those of their neighbors. Moreover, they believed that scientific improvement could ameliorate the troublesome disadvantages of the region's nature-especially its climate, seasonal weather extremes, short growing seasons, uneven topography, and thin soils.(cont.) Scientific improvement would erase the geography of difference which made their lands marginal to the real estate market, staple-crop economy, and migration flows of the British empire and the early United States. Because improving the landscape and environment promised to improve the people inhabiting them, agricultural improvement was also a program for social reform: northern elites crafted projects to employ 'surplus laborers'--especially Indians, Acadians, Jamaican Maroons, women, children, criminals, and the poor-in silk production or in the region's small farms. Yet the limits of the northern environment challenged the regional practicability of scientific agriculture as well as enlightened improvers' pretensions to universalism. I conclude by analyzing these broad ambitions in relation to northern improvers' allegations of widespread indifference (or their own failure to popularize) a scientific approach to agriculture. The study bridges the 'First' and 'Second' Empires in British imperial historiography and the colonial and early national periods in the field of United States history, emphasizing instead the solidarities that persisted among elite Americans, Loyalists, and Britons, through kin, friendship, and scientific networks, despite conflicting allegiances to the Crown or to the republican causes of the American and French Revolutions.by Anya Zilberstein.Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HAST

Placing Joseph Banks in the North Pacific

The South Pacific was a fulcrum of Joseph Banks's maritime world and global networks. The North Pacific was a distance and intangible fringe. This article is concerned with how Banks should be ‘placed’ in the North Pacific. It tracks how Banks's activities have been delineated in terms of languages and categories of global and local, and centre and margin, and then considers the historical and geographical specifics apposite to his connection to the North Pacific. In this setting, ideas of place (as location and assignment) and capital (as a circulatory and everyday practice of exchange and opportunism) come into view and question the distinction between science and commerce in Banks historiography. The article considers a diverse group of non-Indigenous figures – explorers, traders, cartographers, scientists, collectors – operating in the North Pacific in the 1780s and 1790s whose initiatives and missives passed across Banks's desk, and assesses their place in Banks's archive by drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's ideas about the interiorising and exteriorising logic of capital.PostprintPeer reviewe

The history of Atlantic science : collective reflections from the 2009 Harvard seminar on Atlantic history

For the purposes of this review essay, which seeks to capture the spirit of those early conversations in Cambridge, we propose calling the assemblages and interactions of the peoples, objects, institutions, and techniques that resulted in and from colonization during the early modern period ‘‘Atlantic science.’’ We recognize, of course, that not all colonization was bounded by an Atlantic frame. However, in terms of timing, scale, and scope, no other cluster of imperial enterprises can be compared with the conquest and colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. What made colonization in the Atlantic unique was that it involved the voluntary migration of more than two million Europeans, the forced migration of more than ten million Africans, the creation of a vast network of interconnected centers, and the political incorporation ofmuch of the hemisphere into the Western world, all between 1500 and 1825. Nothing of this scale has happened anywhere else in the early modern period. The Atlantic Ocean, rather than Europe, became the center of that world. And so, we see the Atlantic world as an outcome of this colonizing process