Northern Designs: British Science, Imperialism, and Improvement at the Dawn of the Anthropocene

This essay explores the eighteenth-century campaigns in Britain to develop a new kind of imperial economy in the northern reaches of the Atlantic world that would focus less on settler colonies and agriculture, and more on the extraction of minerals, metals, and energy to fuel the burgeoning industrial sectors of England. These efforts reveal how new visions of enlightened progress emerged in the 18th and 19th century that imagined a world filled with endless natural resources capable of being tapped by those with the scientific and administrative know-how to do so.