Whereas today people are becoming very aware of the impact we have on nature, in An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic, Kate Luce Mulry demonstrates that, in the early modern period, people were just as interested in how nature could change them. Mulry traces the ways how Restoration theorists and projectors believed that transforming landscapes could alter people, and argues that the state used environmental projects both at home and abroad, to control their fractious empire. By connecting environmental history to the history of science and politics, Mulry adds a complex layer to the growing scholarship on the place of environmental thought in shaping the Atlantic world.
Mulry starts in London, where by 1666, plague and fire had left the city reeling. She shows how officials blamed the disease on the urban space and the people who lived there. For these theorists, the fire was an opportunity to alter those places (and those people). The time and expense called for by the more elaborate plans meant that most were abandoned, but the projects, as Mulry argues, reveal the Restoration government's belief that the manipulation of space could transform and help control populations, and this perception would influence their approach to population control in the colonies.
In the next two chapters, Mulry takes the reader out of the city to look at the drainage of fenlands. In chapter 2 she focuses on England with brief forays into Ireland, and in chapter 3 she investigates projects in colonial New York. Restoration authorities believed the fenlands were dangerous. Their unhealthy environment created deformed bodies and fractious citizens. Their drainage would result in greater profit and better citizens both at home and in the colonies. Mulry details these projects, highlighting resistance to them and the way local pushback allowed for the recasting of protesters as unruly subjects.
Chapter 4 examines how officials looked to transform bodies through food. Mulry focuses on the promotion of certain foods, like root vegetables and corn, that helped mitigate food scarcity and thus supported population growth, which was especially desirable as officials believed such growth was a geopolitical strength. The government saw such projects as desirable and thought the state and the elite should manage them; thus, these were centralized, top-down efforts.
In the final chapter, Mulry looks at the anxieties brought in the wake of new foods and new places. Officials made plans to grow plants from across the empire in gardens in London and Jamaica. They hoped that being able to produce new foods and medicines would demonstrate the benefits of colonies like Jamaica, but many saw such transplantations as dicey propositions because the soil could change the nature of the plants. Furthermore, this concern translated to transplanted populations: Would they too be transformed?
One of Mulry's strengths is the ability to delicately link the different parts of the British empire. The reader learns about projects in London, eastern England, Ireland, New York, Pennsylvania, and Jamaica. By discussing concerns and projects within both English and colonial spaces, she creates a sense of parity between the metropole and the colonies. Officials were as worried about England as they were about their holdings abroad. She also continuously links the colonial and the domestic within the chapters—for example, Charleston, Philadelphia, and Kingston all make a showing in the chapter about London. Here, the Restoration Atlantic is an arena where colonial spaces influenced the domestic and vice versa.
As noted, Mulry covers a tremendous number of places and projects. In fact, the last chapter brings in Asia by showing how projector leaders looked for Asian plants, especially pepper, to cultivate in Jamaica. It seems churlish to ask for more, but I did wonder how, or if, these ideas filtered into ideas regarding Charles II's other new possessions like Tangiers and Bombay. Also, British involvement in the slave trade was expanding at this time, and I would have welcomed more on how ideas of political ecology affected ideas about Africans, both enslaved and free. Mulry does address the topic toward the end of chapter 5, but a little deeper exploration on how it surfaced, or did not, in relation to these populations might help the reader see the limits of these ideas and projects. Were such ideas less powerful where the English were not establishing settler colonies? Did these ideas affect English views of people and places where the English had less control, like in West Africa? How exactly did race and enslavement fit in?
Mulry's main intervention of An Empire Transformed is that political ecology was a tool through which government officials could control populations and colonial outposts. There is no doubt, as Mulry argues, that intellectuals, officials, and the king saw ecology as a means of control and that they established bodies like the Royal Society and the Council of Foreign Plantations as think tanks to explore that agenda. I was struck, however, by how rarely officials could implement such plans and how the most successful projects originated from within communities. I agree with Mulry that examining failures is useful and that plans and projects give us insight into how theorists and officials thought about control. However, picking away at the failures could show us how important environmental control was compared to other priorities, and how deeply shared the ideas of political ecology were as one moved down the social ladder and across space.
An Empire Transformed is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the place of the environment in early modern thought, medicine, politics, and empire. Mulry reveals not only that landscapes and the natural world deeply influenced the way people of the period conceptualized and acted within their world, but also that theorists and governments saw landscapes and bodies as tools of power.
