BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:'Improvement': British colonial settlement and the environment - A
 ndrew Wear (University College London)
DTSTART:20160118T130000Z
DTEND:20160118T141500Z
UID:TALK63628@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:39097
DESCRIPTION:My paper will\, I hope\, form part of a book I am writing on B
 ritish colonial settlement and the environment in both temperate and tropi
 cal colonies. Improvement and the environment in the colonial context has 
 many strands. Some of them are discussed in this paper: advertising to pro
 spective settlers about resources and improvement\, ideological and concep
 tual beliefs\, the role of the law of ownership in ensuring that improveme
 nt of a pre-existing environment took place and the language of improvemen
 t. The paper\, like the book\, goes from the seventeenth century to the ni
 neteenth and in some parts of the book to the twentieth\, so my time perio
 d is very long. Geographically\, this particular paper covers the settler 
 colonies of North America\, Australia\, New Zealand and South Africa\, tho
 ugh much of the material is from North America. Given the limits of space 
 I have generalized across different colonies though differences between th
 e colonies will\, I hope\, become clearer in the book itself.\n\nImproveme
 nt was one of the ideological engines for colonial settlement. It was one 
 of the lenses through which colonial settlement was viewed\, with its own 
 discourses and as well as being one of the inducements and one of the driv
 ers of settlement and of consequent environmental change and destruction o
 f pre-colonial peoples and their cultures. At the very least it was an ind
 icator of change\, though\, ironically\, it was one of the constants of co
 lonisation. Though the sense of improvement changes in some of its meaning
 \, nevertheless\, it is an ever present concept across time and places so 
 my paper may well be eliding some cherished distinctions as to types of em
 pire or kinds of colonization. This is something that can jar with British
  and American historians who tend to concentrate on change and difference 
 rather than on continuities.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR