Abstract
In this chapter theorizes Improvement as a material and symbolic practice. Improvement manifested as a series of ideas about people, things, and spaces that emerged in the early modern period, as well as a set of practices that enacted those ideas. Rooted in the twin modern concepts of betterment and profit, Improvement was practiced across the Atlantic world as a means of aligning rural and colonial areas with global markets and manifested moralized ideas about the rationality of human beings and nature. This process was ecological as well as social and material, and I survey literature on historical ecology to show how Improvement was brought to bear to address ecological and economic problems plaguing capitalist agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To study this complex phenomenon, I utilize archaeological approaches to the study of landscapes in order to explore how the constellations of people, ideas, things, and places cohered into landscapes of improvement at given historical moments. I also utilize Marxian theories of space to explore how tension, contradiction, and struggle manifested as changing landscapes. I explore some of the literature on Improvement in the United Kingdom and North America, examining how studies of Improvement could benefit from this framework. I conclude by suggesting that archaeological theories of landscapes and Marxian theories of space can be fruitfully brought together, to see archaeological stratigraphy and changing landscapes as social relationships.
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Lewis, Q.P. (2016). Improvement, Capitalism, and Landscape Change. In: An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22105-2_2
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