Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.

Farming has modified the natural dynamic of soil erosion/redistribution in significant parts of landscapes, triggering high rates of soil loss and accelerating sediment connectivity. This chapter provides a review of sediment connectivity in grassland, herbaceous and woody crops from knowledge to management. The first section explores the extension of farmland at a global scale and the process of agricultural land expansion. Regarding herbaceous crops, the second section highlights the importance of cropping intensity (one or two crops per year), water supply (rainfed or irrigated), and crop rotation on the sediment-connectivity magnitude. In the section of woody crops, studies done in vineyards, olive groves and citrus orchards describe the processes of sediment connectivity with and without soil conservation practices (e.g., cover crops). The section of sediment connectivity in grasslands includes examples in alpine hillsides, valley bottom and lakes, emphasizing their role as sediment-trapping features. The last section deals with sediment dis-connectivity in farmland due to soil erosion control practices and governmental programs, with examples from Europe and China.

To what extent is the political commitment of the Athenians in 403 explained by their economic condition, regardless of whether they were owners of land and workshops or simply workers in a precarious situation? The character of Eutherus invites us to consider the role played by forms of collective identification based neither on adherence to a political camp – that of the democrats, neutrals, oligarchs or moderates – nor on membership of a statutory group, but on ‘work status.’ In fact, Thrasybulus’ army, in Samos in 411, as in Piraeus in 404/3, included misthōtoi citizens and metics, as well as former slaves, and one might be tempted to recognize in them the coalescence of free and nonfree individuals forming a chorus of precarious workers. At the same time, one cannot underestimate the elitist dimension of the policy conducted by the socalled moderates, such as Archinus, who, when democracy was restored, took care to destroy any possible alliance between workers brought together by the shared experience of battle.

Thirty-two attorneys joined the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program in South Dakota. This chapter explores their backgrounds and why they chose to practice law in rural areas. Beginning with these lawyers’ childhoods, the chapter explains the characteristics of the rural lawyers and explores which characteristics made lawyers more likely to stay.

This chapter concerns environmental relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. Europe and Europeans, and Europe’s flora and fauna, altered environments on other continents. The content of other continents’ biotas, and their soils, seas, and mineral veins, affected Europe too. These sorts of connections, involving animals, plants, microbes, minerals – and many other components of the natural world – had occasionally powerful impacts on European and indeed world history. They began many millennia ago. This chapter begins with an overview of Europe’s distinctive environmental features. It then turns to four broad and overlapping categories, all considered only as regards European connections to other world regions: Europe’s history of biological exchanges, beginning with the arrival from Southwest Asia of the Neolithic complex of domesticated plants and animals; its imperial environmental history, which began in the fifteenth century; its industrial environmental history, which began in late eighteenth century; and the intellectual environmental history of Europe’s interactions with the wider world, mainly between 1700 and 1950.

Introduces complexity of western ranching through the fictional Dutton Yellowstone Ranch, exploring the historical evolution of law and policy of western agricultural operations.

Columella wrote his Res rustica (c. AD 60/1–5) in the wake of a well-developed Roman tradition of agricultural writing. His approach to the ars distinguishes him from Republican predecessors such as Cato and Varro, however, and reflects the scientific culture of the artes of the early Empire. Columella presents agriculture as an august discipline requiring broad, interdisciplinary knowledge and theoretical understanding of nature. Depreciatory views of agriculture, imputed to other Romans, are explained as resulting from moral decline that has led to ignorance of correct technique. Columella’s discussions of manuring (Book II) and vine propagation (Book III) are shaped by his scientific conception of ars, as he argues that close appreciation of the principles of plant life provides the foundation for good agronomy. Columella’s treatise is not only the preeminent work of agronomy from Greco-Roman antiquity but also witness to the vibrant scientific culture of the artes.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

Wedderburn’s final pamphlet, Address to the Lord Brougham and Vaux, contributed to the early nineteenth-century political “war of representation” about whether Black people in the West Indies would be willing to work for wages after emancipation. Although seeming to reiterate the proslavery claim that enslaved people in the West Indies had better living conditions than European wage laborers, Wedderburn’s vision of dwelling on the land outlined a nuanced, speculative decolonial future. The Conclusion finally argues that narratives of the Romantic revolutionary age should include Black abolitionist geographies, a revolution cultivated on common land with pigs, pumpkins, and yams.

This chapter discusses the first anatomically modern humans in the Caucasus (~40,000 YBP); Early Upper Paleolithic sites; the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition; local Aurignacian industries; population dynamics during the Last Glacial Maximum; the Epipaleolithic of the Caucasus; early food production at Chokh; Upper Paleolithic to Neolithic cultural continuity; and the transition to food production.

This chapter moves backward in time to trace the Maroons’ decolonial relationship with the environment, starting with Queen Nanny, a leader in the First Maroon War and a present-day National Hero of Jamaica. Narratives of Nanny’s warfare against the British noted that her fight included growing pumpkins in the rugged Blue Mountains. The chapter then turns to a critically neglected Romantic-era text, R. C. Dallas’s History of the Maroons. Although primarily a military history, Dallas repeatedly admired the Maroons’ communal “superabundance.” Similarly, J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, accompanied by William Blake’s illustrations, described Maroon settlements as viable, sustainable societies that were notable alternatives to plantation capitalism. The Maroons’ agricultural and culinary “superabundance,” documented by Dallas, Stedman, and Blake alike, suggests a Romantic-era ecological critique rooted in communal decolonial practices, which supplements the Romantic figure of the solitary walker who critiques society by communing with nature.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.

Hopkins developed an ecological poetics informed by evolutionary theory, energy physics, and Catholic theology, bearing witness to local devastations of an unsustainable Victorian global economy. His sensitivity to such degradation was heightened by exposure to a range of polluted regions and by the effort to convey poetically his embodied perception of environmental features and patterns. His poems present everything from flashing bird wings, to waves, to wheat fields as dynamically interrelated through the flow of energy, and therefore vulnerable to its squandering by human industry. Such waste is both ecologically and spiritually self-destructive for Hopkins, given that Christ is incarnate in every fibre and force of the material world. His later sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ manifests these concerns by lamenting a river valley poisoned and denuded by globally destructive industry and industrialized agriculture, even as it affirms vulnerable, accountable membership in a wounded terrestrial body that is divinely indwelt.

The economy of later Roman Britain, as seen through the archaeological evidence, shows a series of differences from the earlier system. In summary, the pattern shows first an increasing regionalization of exchange at the expense of the inter-provincial trade dominant in the early Empire, and this greater emphasis on trade within Britain is accompanied by a change in industrial location, as rurally located production centres expand at the expense of those productive units near the civitas centres which had been most significant in the early Empire.