SESSION: Landscapes of Extraction: Colonial and Industrial Histories of British Landscapes, 1700-1900 (FULL-DAY PART 2)
This panel will explore the complex interplay of colonial wealth and industrial development in British landscapes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Britain’s imperial reach expanded, wealth amassed through colonial exploitation fuelled drastic transformations of the British countryside, from Capability Brown’s ‘naturalistic’ landscapes to the copper works of South Wales. Equally, pictorial representations of British landscape registered the physical and social spaces being reshaped by the rise of what Andreas Malm calls ‘fossil capital’. This panel invites papers that interrogate seemingly picturesque or idyllic depictions of the British landscape by attending to their embeddedness in the interlocking operations of colonial domination and resource extraction. We also welcome papers that examine critical representations of the British landscape as a site of exploitation or despoilation. Alongside paintings, prints, and photographs, we will consider maps, technical diagrams, and other pictorial formats to uncover the diverse perspectives on industry, energy, pollution, race, and empire that emerged during this period.
Topics may include the representation of colonial wealth in ‘country house portraits’, the imperial or industrial ties of lauded British painters or patrons, and the celebration, critique, or erasure of colonial and industrial extraction in landscape paintings. We particularly encourage submissions that broaden ‘British’ art by focusing on Welsh, Scottish, and Irish landscapes and painters, as well as papers considering the colonial and environmental legacies of British imperialism and industrial development.
Session Convenors:
Eleanor Stephenson, University of Cambridge
Stephanie O’Rourke, University of St Andrews
Session Speakers:
Ruth Hibbard, Victoria & Albert Museum
Sublime and Devastated Landscapes: The Artistic Appeal of Quarries in the Late 18th and Early 19th centuries
This paper will examine paintings and drawings from the 18th and 19th centuries depicting man-made extraction terrains, such as quarries, and how these fit within the traditions of the picturesque and sublime, which are usually concerned with natural landscapes. Invasive forms of mining and quarrying, and the expansion of extraction industries from the late 18th century, created new, substantial and imposing features on the British landscape. They were sometimes illustrated as picturesque scenes of rural labour but were more often seen as sublime, forbidding and imposing spectacles. Artists such as Warwick Smith, Ibbetson, and Day, were drawn to these locations, such as the vast Parys mine in Anglesey, Wales, depicting them as awe-inspiring and monumental. Such severe reconfiguration of the landscape, resulting in the unremitting depletion of geological resources, is achieved through violent interventions such as blasting and the use of local workers for the necessarily arduous labour. These industries had indelible links to wider global economies, including the slave trade, particularly the supply of copper for the production of stills used to manufacture rum. This paper will use visual analysis of artworks alongside historical records to interrogate the artistic appeal of such seismic alterations to the British landscape, and how artists admired the triumphant power – and signalled the harsh realities – of the 18th– and 19th-century extraction industries. It will consider whether the aestheticization of these spaces through art normalised these devastated landscapes.
Debaleena Bagchi, Bard Graduate Center
A Deep Blue Stain: The Colonial Legacy of Indigo Production in South Asia
Folio 39 of the book India Ancient and Modern: A Series of Illustrations of the Countries and People of India and Adjacent Territories is labelled “Indigo Factory, Bengal.” Created after a watercolour sketch by the Scottish journalist and war painter William Simpson, this chromolithograph offers a topographical view of a bustling indigo factory in British-occupied Bengal, India. The brightly coloured landscape is dotted with men and women engaged in various stages of indigo dye production. The scene appears largely pastoral, with a flowing river and lush green plains; only the smoke rising from the chimney in the background signals the industrial nature of this “factory.”
This image was first created in 1859, the same year when thousands of farmers from present-day West Bengal, India, took to the streets to protest the violent conditions under which they were forced to cultivate indigo. This paper puts forward a decolonial reading of William Simpson’s “Indigo Factory, Bengal,” and other such visual depictions of indigo farming in nineteenth-century India, in the context of this “Indigo Revolt.” In so doing, it explores how marginalised colonial subjects were not simply subservient to colonial systems of extraction; instead, they continually resisted them.
India was the world’s largest supplier of indigo in the nineteenth century—a direct result of exploitative colonial practices. In closing, I turn to William Morris’s celebrated indigo-dyed design, Strawberry Thief, to consider how the colonial indigo industry implicated even those who valorised handcraftsmanship and critiqued industrial mass production.
Maura Coughlin, Northeastern University
Extraction and Salvage in the Rage Trade
Textiles made from linen, cotton and hemp required significant material extractions from the agricultural landscape. Even as their production shifted from the cottage to the watermill, to the factory powered by coal-fired steam engines, industrialized clothing and other textile products remained valuable throughout the nineteenth century and were not discarded until functionally exhausted. Moreover, salvage practices extended the lives of old clothing and worn-out linens through the second-hand trade and practices of mending and remaking. When no longer otherwise useful, textile rags and other wasted fibers like rope and sailcloth were a waste-commons that was gleaned, sorted and recuperated in the international rag trade that supplied manufactures of paper. Prior to the use of wood pulp in late 19th-century papermaking, linen, hemp, and cotton rags were in short supply. This paper examines imagery of the 18th and 19th rag trade in Great Britain, Ireland, Normandy and Brittany and the picturing of connected textile salvage networks and labours in visual culture. Thinking about the anti-extractive ecologies of cloth recuperation and its appeal for visual artists offers an instructive circular model of exchange where waste is reframed as resource.
Stephanie O’Rourke, University of St Andrews
Response:: “Landscapes from Below”