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 produced by Britons in the Caribbean, the South Pacific, and India to uncover how each played a...

Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the 2nd Duchess of Portland (1715-1785), was one of the wealthiest women in eighteenth-century Britain. She collected fine and decorative arts (the Portland Vase was her most famous acquisition), but her great love was natural history, and shells in particular. Over the course of twenty years, she amassed the largest shell collection of her time, which was sold after her death in a spectacular auction.
Beth Fowkes Tobin illuminates the interlocking issues surrounding the global circulation of natural resources, the commodification of nature, and the...

Rejecting traditional notions of what constitutes art, this book brings together essays on a variety of fiber arts to recoup women's artistic practices by redefining what counts as art. Although scholars over the last twenty years have turned their attention to fiber arts, redefining the conditions, practices, and products as art, there is still much work to be done to deconstruct the stubborn patriarchal art/craft binary. With essays on a range of fiber art practices, including embroidery, knitting, crocheting, machine stitching, rug making, weaving, and quilting, this collection contributes...