Featuring an explanation of Enlightenment thought on agronomy and political economy, Chapter 3 examines the efforts to make Mauritius a self-sufficient island through the importation and naturalisation of plants (primarily foodstuffs and fodder, also some industrial materials, and a few ornamental plants). It explores how newly introduced and ‘old’ plants were cultivated and how local knowledge, which was gathered together with the plants in their countries of origin, was implemented. It highlights the practical significance of knowledge about plants in relation to their cultivation of Malagasy and non-European communities across Asia. It seeks to understand how settlers sought to cultivate foreign, newly introduced staple crops, such as rice, root vegetables, and fruit trees. Stressing the importance of non-European knowledge, the chapter looks at the interplay of this knowledge between its practical implementation and environmental factors. The chapter reveals that cultivation techniques were difficult to implement and often led to a crop’s failure.

Chapter 4 discusses various cultural constructions of physical difference: racialised phenotype, supposed medical predisposition or resistance to specific diseases and climes, and concepts of filthiness and hygiene. The eighteenth-century Navy was embedded into the structural racism of the Atlantic world and British empire, and many seamen suffered from this. Yet, unlike other institutions, it still rarely used ‘race’ as a systematic label to recruit, classify, or sift its workforce. Seamen were occasionally deployed according to climatic theories of national character and racialised constructions of disease and immunity. However, many naval surgeons still saw immunity as acquired rather than innate, and thus modifiable and dependent on a man’s most recent deployment, rather than intrinsic to ‘race’. Similarly, prejudice surrounding the cleanliness and attitudes of some groups of ‘foreigners’ was linked more to the administrative structures of foreign countries and navies than to essentialist understandings of the individuals themselves. Therefore, in the eyes of many officers, virtually any able man could be absorbed, reformed, and put to use by British naval discipline. This did not mitigate the violence and discrimination of everyday racism, but it highlights the somewhat levelling attitude of an administration bent on maximising its efficient exploitation of manpower.

Chapter 4 focuses on alpaca wool – a novel South American fibre that first entered British markets in the mid-1830s. Already widely used in Peru, alpaca wool first took off in Britain in 1836, after the woollen manufacturer Titus Salt discovered a bag of the fibre while walking through the docks in Liverpool. It was imported in increasing quantities from Peru in the 1840s and 1850s and used for the manufacture of shawls, cloth, ladies’ dresses and umbrellas. Charting the alpaca’s journey from the Andes to the outback, the chapter considers why contemporaries set so much store by the animal and how they went about appropriating it. It assesses how increased access, new technologies and new markets made alpaca wool viable and profitable as a luxury fabric and examines the transcontinental relationships that brought alpaca fibre, and later living alpacas, to Britain and its colonies. The chapter also emphasises the important local and regional dynamics of alpaca naturalisation, and the ways in which alpacas infiltrated wider discussions about identity, free trade and biopiracy. It concludes with a study of the alpaca’s wild relative, the vicuña, hunted to the point of extinction for its coveted fleece.

Chapter 3 explores the promises and contradictions inherent in the information drawn from these local and global knowledge networks. There were tensions that were never quite resolved between the production of locally relevant knowledge that rejected theoretical approaches and a global intellectual movement that praised universal knowledge. The Economic Society responded to this by carefully negotiating the sources of knowledge which it received from its networks, especially on the topics of natural history and medical botany, and building up its own epistemologies and definitions of practical Enlightenment that made the local applicability of any information the ultimate test of its value. Frameworks of knowledge with universal aspirations, such as Linnaean taxonomy, were not welcome when local descriptions would be more translateable within Central America. I argue that these stubbornly local conceptualisations of knowledge became problematic when a comparison with other places was required, for instance in the context of attempting to export plants from Guatemala to other places, and in debating the merits of plantain trees with scholars in other parts of the empire.

This chapter examines how transatlantic travel writing helped to redefine climate throughout the long eighteenth century. Beginning with the challenge that early modern travellers’ encounters with North American extremes offered to classical theories of climate, this chapter first considers how fears about the inevitable influence of degenerative air gave way to a sense that settlers could change the climate. By emphasising the improving survival rates of European crops and animals, advocates for North American settlement reframed evidence of certain types of productivity as evidence that the climate itself was improving. By thus narrowing the definition of climate, however, this pattern of writing also opened a gap between the stories of improvement circulating in Britain and settlers’ reports on conditions on the (still cold) ground – and so, for many early modern observers, this transatlantic exchange also inspired new scepticism about the political interests served by promises of a changing climate.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.