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Title: Northern Designs: British Science, Imperialism, and Improvement at the Dawn of the Anthropocene
Description: 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.
Date Created: 2016
PID: grinnell:17947

Title: Tapping natureG??s bounty: science and sugar maples in the age of improvement
Description: This piece analyzes the eighteenth-century campaigns to develop a maple sugar industry in North America as a way of undercutting slavery and the sugar-plantation complex of the Caribbean. It is part of a larger collection that examines how trees became woven into the cultural, economic, and political fabric of life in the eighteenth century, and uses the case of the sugar maple to explore the intersections between nature, enlightenment science, and new ambitions for societal reform.
Date Created: 2016
PID: grinnell:17946