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Colonizing nature : the tropics in British arts and letters, 1760-1820 / Beth Fowkes Tobin.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: Philadelphia : PENN/University of Pennsylvania Press, c2005.Description: xvi, 255 p. : ill. ; 24 cmISBN:
  • 0812238354 (cloth : alk. paper)
  • 9780812238358 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subject(s): Additional physical formats: Online version:: Colonizing nature.LOC classification:
  • PR129.T76 T63 2005
Contents:
Introduction : Troping the tropics and aestheticizing labor -- Tropical bounty, local knowledge, and the imperial georgic -- Provisional economies : slave gardens in the writings of British sojourners -- Land, labor, and the English garden conversation piece in India -- Picturesque ruins, decaying empires, and British imperial character in Hodges's Travels in India -- Seeing, writing, and revision : natural history discourse and Captain Cook's A voyage towards the South Pole, and round the world -- Domesticating the tropics : tropical flowerrs, botanical books, and the culture of collecting --
Epilogue : Decolonizing garden history.
Review: "With its control of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tea, cotton, and indigo production in India, Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dominated the global economy of tropical agriculture. In Colonizing Nature, Beth Fowkes Tobin shows how dominion over "the tropics" as both a region and an idea became central to the way in which Britons-imagined their role in the world." "Just as mastery of tropical nature, and especially its potential for agricultural productivity, became key concepts in the formation of British imperial identity, Colonizing Nature suggests that intellectual and visual mastery of the tropics - through the creation of art and literature - accompanied material appropriations of land, labor, and natural resources. Tobin convincingly argues that the depictions of tropical plants, gardens, and landscapes that circulated in the British imagination provide a key to understanding the forces that shaped the British Empire."--BOOK JACKET.
List(s) this item appears in: Garden of Ideas

Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-249) and index.

Introduction : Troping the tropics and aestheticizing labor -- Tropical bounty, local knowledge, and the imperial georgic -- Provisional economies : slave gardens in the writings of British sojourners -- Land, labor, and the English garden conversation piece in India -- Picturesque ruins, decaying empires, and British imperial character in Hodges's Travels in India -- Seeing, writing, and revision : natural history discourse and Captain Cook's A voyage towards the South Pole, and round the world -- Domesticating the tropics : tropical flowerrs, botanical books, and the culture of collecting --

Epilogue : Decolonizing garden history.

"With its control of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tea, cotton, and indigo production in India, Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dominated the global economy of tropical agriculture. In Colonizing Nature, Beth Fowkes Tobin shows how dominion over "the tropics" as both a region and an idea became central to the way in which Britons-imagined their role in the world." "Just as mastery of tropical nature, and especially its potential for agricultural productivity, became key concepts in the formation of British imperial identity, Colonizing Nature suggests that intellectual and visual mastery of the tropics - through the creation of art and literature - accompanied material appropriations of land, labor, and natural resources. Tobin convincingly argues that the depictions of tropical plants, gardens, and landscapes that circulated in the British imagination provide a key to understanding the forces that shaped the British Empire."--BOOK JACKET.

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