Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 176-182

With its control of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tea, cotton, and indigo production in India, Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dominated the global economy of tropical agriculture. In Colonizing Nature, Beth Fowkes Tobin shows how dominion over "the tropics" as both a region and an idea became central to the way in which Britons imagined their role in the world.

Tobin examines georgic poetry, landscape portraiture, natural history writing, and botanical prints pro...