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

Industrial cowboys: Miller & Lux and the transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920

Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller & Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. Industrial Cowboys examines how Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two German immigrants, consolidated the West's most extensive land and water rights, swayed legislatures and courts, monopolized western beef markets, and imposed their corporate will on California's natural environment. Told with clarity and originality, this story uses one fascinating case study to illuminate the industrial development and environmental transformation of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. David Igler examines the broader impact that industrialism--as exemplified by Miller & Lux--had on landscapes and waterscapes, and on human as well as plant and animal life in the West. He also provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller & Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force. The book also covers such topics as land acquisition and reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. Above all, Igler highlights essential issues that resonate for us today: who holds the right and who has the power to engineer the landscape for market production