I am a historian of early modern Europe, especially 16th- and 17th-century England, and my work pulls together threads from different historical disciplines, including political history, the history of science and technology, and environmental history. I am fascinated by the ways that human history is intimately linked with the environment, and I am most interested in how early modern European states and empires worked to understand, manage, and profit from the natural world, especially with respect to using and conserving natural resources such as water, wood, and wildlife. I have chosen books that explore these issues in innovative and exciting ways.
I wrote...
The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England
Draining the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest engineering projects in early modern Europe. The medieval Fens were a vast region of peat wetlands spanning hundreds of thousands of acres, with a local population who had a distinct agricultural economy and way of life that were well adapted to the marshy environment. During the seventeenth century, the English crown, ambitious investors, and large landowners worked together to drain the Fens, convert them into fertile farmland, and “civilize” the supposedly backward and sickly people who lived there. This effort was only partially successful, but it permanently altered the landscape and disrupted the fenland inhabitants’ way of life.
I love this book because it does such a masterful job of demonstrating how peoples, states, and the natural environment are closely linked with one another.
The book is about early modern Venice and its mainland empire, its immense and constant need for wood, and the state’s efforts to ensure that need could be sustainably met in both the near and distant future. The Venetians came to understand nature through the careful conservation of a vital but fragile resource, and their government developed to meet that challenge.
Over four centuries Venice created a unique bureaucracy of forestry and forest management, staffed by experts and tasked with counting and maintaining all of the trees within its vast territories.
Wood was essential to the survival of the Venetian Republic. To build its great naval and merchant ships, maintain its extensive levee system, construct buildings, fuel industries, and heat homes, Venice needed access to large quantities of oak and beech timber. The island city itself was devoid of any forests, so the state turned to its mainland holdings for this vital resource. A Forest on the Sea explores the history of this enterprise and Venice's efforts to extend state control over its natural resources. Karl Appuhn explains how Venice went from an isolated city completely dependent on foreign suppliers for…
A fascinating look at the use of coal as a main fuel source in early modern London, the fearsome pollution that resulted from it, and efforts to understand and mitigate the effects of that pollution.
I think the most impressive aspect of this book is how many different approaches Cavert takes in examining his topic—political and legal history, history of science, social and economic history, even literary criticism. He argues that London was the first “modern” city in that it was the first to rely heavily on burning fossil fuels to provide the energy that powered its early industrial economy.
The Smoke of London uncovers the origins of urban air pollution, two centuries before the industrial revolution. By 1600, London was a fossil-fuelled city, its high-sulfur coal a basic necessity for the poor and a source of cheap energy for its growing manufacturing sector. The resulting smoke was found ugly and dangerous throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading to challenges in court, suppression by the crown, doctors' attempts to understand the nature of good air, increasing suburbanization, and changing representations of urban life in poetry and on the London stage. Neither a celebratory account of proto-environmentalism nor a declensionist…
Another book about wood, but this one focuses on England and its early empire on both sides of the Atlantic.
With chapters that address England, Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados, Pluymers shows just how complicated it could be even to understand the diverse forests found throughout the empire, let alone exploit and profit from them. I especially like the way he combines the broadest geographical scope with careful attention to the local details and nuances of each woodland he studies.
He also does a wonderful job of showing how both local needs and global markets shaped the ways that woodlands were understood and managed.
In early modern England, wood scarcity was a widespread concern. Royal officials, artisans, and common people expressed their fears in laws, petitions, and pamphlets, in which they debated the severity of the problem, speculated on its origins, and proposed solutions to it. No Wood, No Kingdom explores these conflicting attempts to understand the problem of scarcity and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies.
Popular accounts have often suggested that deforestation served as a "push" for English colonial expansion. Keith Pluymers shows that wood scarcity in England, rather than a problem…
Mulry also takes Britain and its trans-Atlantic empire as her focus.
What most impressed me about the book was the exciting way she shows how individual health and personal character, public health, the natural environment, and statecraft were all strangely intertwined in the 17th century.
She argues that the many schemes for “improving” the landscape of both England and its overseas colonies were intended not only to yield a profit for investors, but also to foster public health and knit together the far-flung empire into a healthy body politic. I find myself recommending this book on a regular basis.
Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement
When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King's sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England's land and the improvement of his subjects' health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places…
A superb history of a particular landscape in the midst of profound political, economic, and environmental transformation; it is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary research.
The book explores the Connecticut River valley in colonial New England, and shows how the economic needs and interactions of the Native American and European inhabitants completely reshaped the ecology of the region.
My favorite chapter is Roberts’s brilliant analysis of the lucrative trade in beaver pelts, which not only shifted the balance of power between Native Americans and European settlers, it also eradicated the beavers and their extensive network of dams, erasing the vast wetlands of the region and leaving the river itself unrecognizable.
Focusing on the Connecticut River Valley-New England's longest river and largest watershed- Strother Roberts traces the local, regional, and transatlantic markets in colonial commodities that shaped an ecological transformation in one corner of the rapidly globalizing early modern world. Reaching deep into the interior, the Connecticut provided a watery commercial highway for the furs, grain, timber, livestock, and various other commodities that the region exported. Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy shows how the extraction of each commodity had an impact on the New England landscape, creating a new colonial ecology inextricably tied to the broader transatlantic economy beyond its shores.
This…
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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