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About this episode

A presentation by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Assistant Professor of British History in the History Department at the University of Chicago.Part of the University of Chicago Program on the Global Environment's inaugural conference on the Social Life of Forests, held May 30-31, 2008. This paper rethinks the origins of classical economics from the perspective of the new historiography of science and environmental change. It also revises the arguments of Richard Grove in Green Imperialism by analyzing the relation of classical political economy to rival forms of natural knowledge. Eighteenth century natural historians tended to stress the particularity and instability of natural processes on the periphery. Forests figured prominently as crucibles of climate change, as patriotic projects to secure naval timber, and as models of long-term resource management either by the colonial state or paternalist landlords. In Scotland, the myth of the prehistoric Caledonian Forest became a particular spur for such schemes from the 1770s onward. Contemporary writers used Roman and medieval sources to assert the existence of a vast forest in the Scottish Highlands up until recent times. They also insisted that the destruction of these woodlands by invading armies and shortsighted locals had set in motion a process of climate deterioration and peat bog formation across the north. The myth of the Caledonian forest thus offered a northern counterpoint to the anxieties regarding deforestation in tropical colonies. It was employed to mobilize planting schemes by government bodies as well as private landlords in the 1760s and 1770s. In this way, natural historians used evidence of environmental degradation to plead for the importance of their expertise in managing peripheries.The myth of the Caledonian Forest helps shed new light on the environmental presuppositions of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Adam Smith was indebted to natural historians such as Carl Linnaeus, Pehr Kalm and Pierre Poivre for his understanding of natural systems in general as well as the specifics of colonial agriculture and forestry. But Smith read these natural histories selectively in order to underscore the harmonious and benign operation of natural systems across the globe. Despite his familiarity with patterns of ecological degradation, climate change, and natural cycles of drought, Smith downplayed such evidence in favor of a providential notion of self-regulating natural cycles, which only overweening policies of economic protectionism could disturb. Against the claims of the Scottish naturalists, Smith looked at deforestation only as a simple indicator of progress. The reduction of woodland was to Smith an entirely desirable affair, analogous to the removal of a surplus population of small tenants, with no malign environmental effects. Smith’s selective appropriation of natural history thus made it possible to ground exchange in a providential balance of nature while also rejecting out of hand pleas for the colonial management of nature. Yet this “liberation” of nature arguably came at the cost of excluding a great deal of natural knowledge from the domain of economic analysis. By relating the environmental presuppositions of The Wealth of Nations to the rival claims of natural historians, we can in fact chart the emergence of two diametrically opposed blind spots: a political critique of the imperial state that deliberately abandoned the need for environmental expertise and a form of ecological knowledge which celebrated colonial domination.

• Category

  Learning

• Release Date

  May 30, 2008

• Runtime

  27:07