Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain

Introduction

The development of the discipline of natural history went hand-in-hand with colonization and Atlantic slavery. Between 1698 and 1807, roughly 11,000 British ships transported at least three million enslaved men, women, and children from the African continent to European colonies in the continental Americas and the Caribbean. In the British West Indies, enslaved persons’ labor on plantations produced such commodities as sugar, which colonists shipped to Britain for sale. The same vessels transported animals and plants throughout the empire, as curiosities and fodder for scientific investigation.

The most basic definition of ecology is a system of relations. Prospects of Empire traces the myriad prospects that these transatlantic ecologies summoned in the long eighteenth century. It attends to the empire’s gaze upon bodies and territories, it speculations and desires, its endeavors to capitalize upon seized land and labor, as well as its failures to manage its would be subjects. What surfaces are the imbrications of natural history, the racialization and gendering of bodies, the exploitation of resources in the interest of financial gain, and the instability of human and geographic boundaries in the British West Indies and metropolitan London.

Print culture played a central role in forming and disseminating these imperial prospects. Through print, the British imagined and sought to ensure their rule and to contain perceived threats to their regime of knowledge and power. Abolitionists also mustered print media to depict and challenge those forces. Prospects of Empire reveals the latent anxieties that permeated the world of eighteenth century Atlantic Britain.

Curated by:

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies, Yale University

and

Heather Vermeulen, Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University

For questions/comments about the online exhibit, please contact walpole@yale.edu.

Published August 2020