Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians

The very first plant that the Finnish naturalist Pehr Kalm noticed as he set foot in America in 1748 was a tuft of native grass, a species of the genus Andropogon. The sight induced a flash of taxonomic vertigo. How could a single natural historian cope with a whole continent of new species? “Whenever I looked to the ground I found everywhere such plants as I had never seen before … I was seized with terror at the thought of ranging so many new and unknown parts of natural history.”1 While Kalm's moment of confusion perhaps was exaggerated for rhetorical effect, the episode captures the new centrality of natural knowledge in the world of eighteenth-century commerce. Between 1748 and 1751, Kalm surveyed the colonial environment from Philadelphia through New Jersey and then north up the Hudson Valley to Quebec. The naturalist had been sent on a mission of classification and bio-prospecting funded by the Swedish state and masterminded by his teacher Carolus Linnaeus. The taxonomic aim was to extend Linnaeus's new system of binomial classification to North America by collecting plants and gathering local knowledge. His other priority was to harness nature for the purpose of national improvement.

Kalm was among a group of nineteen “apostles” [lärljungar] trained by Linnaeus to scour the globe for a harvest of useful plants that would help diversify and enrich the natural wealth of Sweden. But this was not simply some eccentric preoccupation of a small northern nation. When an English translation of Kalm's travel journal was published in 1770–1771, it contributed to a growing interest in Linnaean science among British elites. Other students of Linnaeus were recruited as expert travelers on James Cook's voyages of circumnavigation. After sailing with Cook in 1768–1771, Daniel Solander became the trusted collaborator of Sir Joseph Banks, the manager of the imperial plant exchange at Kew Gardens. In Scotland during the 1760s, John Walker and John Hope introduced the Linnaean method as a tool of internal colonization in the Highlands. At the same time, the French gardener André Thouin aimed to diversify and strengthen French agriculture by adding new plants to the royal botanic garden in Paris. His physiocratic correspondent Pierre Poivre pioneered an early form of scientific conservationism on the Isle de France in the Indian Ocean in 1767–1772. Across Western nations and empires in the second half of the eighteenth century, natural history became a privileged instrument of power to shape the natural order.2

For Kalm and Linnaeus, the knowledge of grass offered a crucial foundation for agricultural improvement. Without good cattle fodder, it was impossible to reach the high levels of manure production required to maintain soil fertility in a regime of commercial mixed husbandry. Sown grasses and new fodder plants were indispensable elements of the green revolution that swept across western Europe in the early modern era.3 As Kalm set out for America, Linnaeus was completing the Pan Svecicus, a list of close to 900 indigenous Swedish grasses that could be used for livestock grazing. Kalm, too, had been involved for many years with experiments in grass cultivation together with his aristocratic patron Sten Carl Bielke. Before the journey to America, he had collected grass species in Russia and overseen their introduction on Bielke's Swedish estate Lövsta, north of Stockholm.4 But in America, he discovered little interest in this kind of husbandry. While Kalm's investigations yielded a rich inventory of American grasses, he found that European settlers treated the question with indifference at best. They left their cattle to range freely through the forest, grazing on the abundant native annual grasses, which allowed the livestock to multiply greatly. Soon the expanding herds destroyed the original food supply and fell into rapid decline, in both numbers and stature. For Kalm, this conduct was an object lesson in poor husbandry and worse morals. Settlers greedily took advantage of the fertility stored in “virgin soils,” yet they refused to replenish the land with manure when it showed signs of exhaustion. This was madness when God had filled the land with useful native plants that could serve as good hay for cattle to increase manure production. But the majority of American farmers appeared blind to the blessings of natural history: “the grain fields, the meadows, the forests, the cattle … are [all] treated with equal carelessness.” Crucially, Kalm's condemnation contained a strong political undercurrent. The divine utility of nature required expert management. This interpretation of nature was firmly grounded in the northern European tradition of cameralism, a movement that sought to strengthen the revenue base of landlocked northern states through projects of improvement and internal colonization. After his long journey through British America, Kalm singled out the governor of New France, Marquis de La Galissonnière, as a paragon of husbandry: “He told me several ways of employing natural history to the purposes of politics and to make a country powerful.” By implication, British husbandry in North America would prosper only if experts were elevated to positions of power.5

Kalm's cameralist politics of grass was not the only interpretation of colonial husbandry to enter the Enlightenment. Against Kalm's ecology, Adam Smith articulated a liberal view of the problem of American agriculture. Smith relied directly on Kalm's Travels into North America for his own account of American agriculture in The Wealth of Nations (1776). He agreed with Kalm that the early settlers had adopted wasteful practices. The “great abundance” of land in North America had encouraged the proliferation of free-ranging cattle, let loose by farmers to graze on the profusion of native vegetation. After an initial explosion in numbers, the cattle had depleted the pastureland by cropping the annual grasses “too early in the spring, before they had time to form their flowers.” As a result, the livestock “degenerated sensibly from one generation to another,” growing “stunted” in much the same way as the “breed which was common all over Scotland thirty or forty years ago.” But in contrast to Kalm, Smith was optimistic about the long-term prospects of colonial husbandry. He stressed that Scottish cattle had recovered from the process of degeneration and were “now … much mended through the greater part of the low country” because of rising cattle prices and concomitant investments in breeding and forage. Eventually a large market in beef would emerge in North America as well, inclining farmers to take an interest in cultivated grasses and the collection of manure to introduce mixed husbandry of the English sort.6

This quarrel over grass and cattle suggests a new way to think about empire and capitalism. In essence, the defense of global commerce pioneered in the Enlightenment was inextricably tied to the improvement of the natural order. But from the outset, the conversion of nature into capital raised a fundamental question of management. Was the market sufficient to order nature, or did the complexity of the natural order require the intervention of an environmental expertise? To grasp this problem accurately, we must resist the temptation to conflate natural history with political economy within a single idiom of improvement. Richard Drayton assumes that “over the long eighteenth century … the natural sciences and political economy became inflected … into an idea of government in the public and cosmopolitan interest.” After the end of European empires, this doctrine persisted under a new name as the “enterprise of ‘Development’ … [and] became the idol of economists and politicians of all races and nations.” Yet there are good reasons to suspect that this hypothesis of a unitary model of improvement glosses over serious disagreements regarding the priorities of development among different kinds of experts. “Seeing like a state,” to use James Scott's phrase, involved a variety of strategies to make nature legible, not all of which were compatible.7

For Adam Smith and his successors in the classical liberal tradition, nature served as a handmaiden for exchange in a double sense. They looked to the natural world for a model of self-regulating balance that justified their own faith in market exchange. At the same time, they championed the market as the best means of managing the balance of nature. Technological innovation, resource substitution, and conservation were all dictated by the rise and fall of prices. Against this liberal view, a loose constellation of naturalists, forestry writers, and assorted imperialists suggested that the natural order was too complex or too fragile to be left unregulated, particularly on the peripheries of the nation and empire. They too favored commercial growth but linked it to priorities of protection, including the conservation of forests and strategic resources. Naturalists such as Kalm and Linnaeus founded their expertise on a combination of local knowledge and universal taxonomy that appropriated indigenous information into a global vision of climate zones and ecological exchange. They shared with liberal savants a strong interest in winning the patronage of the state to transform their expert judgments into policy and law.

In short, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of two rival ecologies of commerce.8 This quarrel over expertise pitted two distinct versions of global modernity against each other along environmental lines. It is thus deeply misleading to cast the history of classical liberalism solely in terms of a struggle between “cosmopolitan” defenders of free trade and “economic nationalists,” as Istvan Hont and Lisbet Koerner have suggested.9 The forces of empire and global capitalism inspired not just the defense of free markets but also a dawning awareness of the environmental foundation of imperialism and the ecological costs of development. Where classical liberalism developed from David Hume's specie-flow mechanism over Smith's division of labor to T. R. Malthus's population principle and David Ricardo's concept of comparative advantage, natural history followed a trajectory from Linnaeus's universal taxonomy and Poivre's conservationism to Banks's imperial projects of ecological exchange and Alexander von Humboldt's global plant geography.10

During the Enlightenment, natural historians across Europe claimed expert authority in managing the environment of the nation and empire. Leading eighteenth-century naturalists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Linnaeus, and Banks enlisted the state in projects to diversify and bolster national and colonial economies through resource inventories and ecological exchange. A major impetus for this development came from the Swedish botanist Linnaeus's new system of global taxonomy. For Linnaeus, natural history promised to make the Swedish state economically self-sufficient after the loss of its territorial empire in 1721 through the discovery of indigenous substitutes for foreign commodities and the acclimatization of exotic cash crops. But there was no necessary connection between cameralism and natural history. When the Linnaean method was introduced to Britain, it was appropriated by the aristocratic collector Banks to prop up the imperial state in an age of crisis. From the late 1770s onward, Banks built up a worldwide network of naturalists, surgeons, and assorted travelers who delivered valuable observations, seeds, and plants to his headquarters at Kew Gardens outside London. Kew became a great transfer hub for the movement of useful plants from one end of the empire to the other. Banks's efforts mirrored earlier mercantilist schemes in France that were triggered by military defeats in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Natural history was ideologically ambiguous, attracting Swedish cameralists, British neo-mercantilists, French physiocrats, and even republican figures such as Humboldt and Thomas Jefferson. But beneath the diversity of political opinion was a common assumption that expertise about natural systems should have a central place in the making of modern polities and economies.11

The attempt to shape colonial ecologies in the Enlightenment formed a political afterthought to the vast biological transformation wrought by the Columbian exchange. Ecological transfers of plants, animals, and pathogens between the New World and the Old had reshaped biota in numerous ways on both sides of the Atlantic since 1492. In the early stages, most of these global flows were the result of local initiatives or unintended consequences, without direct intervention by the state. Spain was the first Atlantic power to aspire to coordinate ecological exchange through centralized scientific and bureaucratic procedures of collection in the sixteenth-century institution known as the Casa de la contratación.12 Yet it was only in the eighteenth century that natural history became a common tool of European states. Banks used his close ties with the ministry of William Pitt the Younger to embark on numerous projects of this sort, including the transfer of cochineal insects from South America to Madras, breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, cotton seeds from India to the West Indies, tea plants from China to Bengal, and Merino sheep from Spain to England. Many of these projects proved chimerical. But there were also successes. The tea transfer was finally accomplished by the middle of the nineteenth century. Another relatively fruitful endeavor was the wholesale exportation of a “portmanteau biota” to Australia. It was Banks who selected the seeds and plants that were carried out on the First Fleet to the New South Wales settlement in 1788. A government farm served as the entry point for new seeds and plants: wheat, barley, oranges, apples, hemp, flax, potatoes, and much more. By 1792, the horticultural basis of the settlement had stabilized, and it could serve as a staging post for further British penetration into the South Pacific. Banks thus laid the groundwork for engineering the environment of New South Wales into a “Neo-Europe.”13

Another legacy of eighteenth-century natural history was a growing interest in conservation. Linnaeus and other naturalists held that divine providence had organized the natural world in a system of equilibrium between food supply and population, predator and prey, scavenger and carrion. This notion of an “economy of nature” served to sensitize observers to instances of ecological disturbance. The French physiocratic naturalist Pierre Poivre pioneered a new form of science-based conservation in the late 1760s on the Isle de France (Mauritius) by postulating a causal link between deforestation and climate change. In his widely read book Travels of a Philosopher, published in multiple editions in French and English, Poivre warned that clear-cutting would lead to the desiccation of the island. He managed to persuade the governor of Mauritius to enact a series of reforms to protect the remaining forests and take measures to encourage sustainable agriculture within the colony. Similar schemes were set in motion by naturalists elsewhere. Linnaeus's student Anders Sparrman helped shape a conservationist land ethic in the Cape Colony after 1785. In early-nineteenth-century British India, colonial officials trained in botany managed the first state-run forest preserves. In the Scottish Highlands, the voyages of Linnaean travelers such as James Robertson and John Walker in the 1760s and 1770s spurred the birth of Scottish conservationism by encouraging the national myth of a great prehistoric Caledonian forest. Here, too, improvers stressed that afforestation would ameliorate the climate.14

At the core of these different schemes was a moral climatology. The “economy of nature” presupposed a western European ideal of stability and moderation between extremes of arctic cold and equatorial heat. Tropical territories in the “torrid zone” represented a realm of alien excess: teeming biodiversity, spontaneous abundance, debilitating disease, lethal earthquakes, and hurricanes. But even the temperate settler colonies in North America confounded metropolitan expectations. Comte de Buffon and William Robertson cast the New World as a topsy-turvy inversion of the European norm, believing that plants and animals in America must degenerate into feeble and diminutive forms. The founding father and naturalist Thomas Jefferson took it upon himself to refute such disparaging views by demonstrating the vitality and great size of American animals. In other words, the debate over American degeneration further reinforced the significance of naturalist expertise and gave impetus to a self-confident “creole” style of natural history.15

Behind this controversy loomed fundamental uncertainties about the patterns of climate in space and time. The effects of continents and oceans on weather patterns were only imperfectly grasped. The study of climate up until the last three decades of the eighteenth century favored historical and cultural explanations over systematic quantitative observation. Although early conservationists such as Poivre had begun to associate afforestation with beneficial climate effects, other naturalists regarded the temperate climate of northern Europe as an artifact of deforestation, drainage, and general settlement. On the basis of ancient and medieval sources, they posited a history of climate change that oscillated with the rise and fall of civilizations. From this point of view, the accumulated effect of European colonization was expected to alter the climate of the settler colonies over time, at least if their practices were informed by sound and prudent advice from natural historians. When Humboldt revolutionized biogeography and climatology with a new quantitative approach to climate zones and plant geography in 1805, he merely reinforced a moral order of nature firmly established by his predecessors. His “Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain” was replete with advice on how the enlightened state should introduce and manage cash crops in the “torrid zone.” The improvement of nature thus followed two main paths: a gradual convergence of temperate climate settlements toward the European norm, or the imposition of a rule by experts in cases where the climate was deemed too extreme ever to be fully assimilated.16

Scattered throughout Smith'sWealth of Nations are numerous traces of early modern agriculture and environment, ranging over topics such as plant transfer, a potato diet, cattle droving, kitchen gardens, silver mining, and plantation husbandry.17 At critical points, Smith turned to the natural world in search of ecological warrants to justify his economic concepts. His global vision of commerce was matched by a global understanding of the natural world. Smith's central argument about exchange and labor rested on an environmental substrate. “The land constitutes by far the greatest, the most important, and the most durable part of the wealth of every extensive country,” he wrote. Capital formation followed a hierarchy ordained by “the natural order of things”: capital flowed first to “agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all to foreign commerce.”18 While Smith's general views of agriculture are well known, the prodigious scholarship devoted to the thinker has had surprisingly little to say about the environmental basis of his vision.19

Smith shared his liberal notion of nature with a line of thinkers from Hume to Malthus. In particular, he owed a great debt to the French physiocrats and their insistence that a free grain trade was the foundation of national wealth. But an excessively narrow focus on the French grain debates obscures other dimensions of his thought, including the contribution of natural history to his global vision of exchange and the thriving culture of agricultural improvement in his native Scotland. Tellingly, one of his first publications, a letter to the Edinburgh Review in 1755, not only introduced Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie to a Scottish audience but also offered some critical remarks about the natural history of Buffon and René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. When Smith retired from his university position to become a tutor for the future Duke of Buccleuch, one of his responsibilities was to offer advice on the commercial reorganization and improvement of the Buccleuch estates in the Lowlands. His library contained prominent works in natural history and agricultural improvement such as Pliny's Naturalis historiae, Linnaeus's Systema naturae (1735), Benjamin Stillingfleet's introduction to the Linnaean system (1759), Poivre's Voyage d'un philo-sophe (1768), and Kalm's Travels into North America (1770–1771). Smith made explicit references to Pliny, Poivre, Kalm, and Buffon in The Wealth of Nations. In fact, during the years when he was finishing the book in the provincial retirement of his native town of Kirkaldy, he devoted serious attention to the study of botany. Among Smith's close friends and associates were several men with strong interests in agricultural improvement and natural history, including the geologist James Hutton, the judge Henry Home, the chemist Joseph Black, and the physician William Cullen. Their many publications and projects were in turn part of a rich Scottish culture of improvement in the half-century between 1750 and 1800.20 Finally, Smith also seems to have had a professional reason to cultivate an interest in chemistry and natural history. He became a commissioner of customs in 1778. One of his duties was the evaluation of commodities. Black's correspondence contains an intriguing palimpsest in the form of a letter from Smith and his fellow commissioners James Buchanan and Basil Cochrane requesting information on the value and chemical composition of a sample of vegetable alkali, partially hidden underneath a draft letter by Black. Smith's zealous work as a commissioner of customs reveals the crucial place of detailed natural knowledge to servants of the imperial state.21

Smith's classical liberalism at the same time borrowed from and challenged the authority of natural history. For his analysis of cash crops and colonial agriculture in particular—the engines of early modern imperial expansion—he relied on the travel reports of natural historians. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine his success as an armchair philosopher of commerce without the growth of naturalist networks along the edges of European empires. In disciplinary terms, The Wealth of Nations marked a major attempt to legislate the range of natural phenomena that counted as proper objects of economic analysis. Such a challenge presupposed a great deal of space for exchange and confrontation. Disciplinary boundaries had not yet hardened around eighteenth-century fields of knowledge. Instead, Smith found the raw materials for his global vision within the vast middle ground where moral philosophy, jurisprudence, civil history, and natural history mixed and clashed.22

Smith shared with the natural historians a preoccupation with self-regulating properties. His system, of course, rested on a similar principle of homeostasis between supply and demand. He located the basic prospects of economic growth in the positive feedback loop between pasture and arable land, manure production and soil fertility, town and country, manufacturing and agriculture. Political economy and natural history also shared a common recognition of ecological limits. For all of Smith's strident optimism, his theory of labor productivity and mutually advantageous trade still presupposed a bounded economy. All people were “maintained by the annual produce of the land.” “How great soever,” this produce could “never be infinite, but must have certain limits.” Natural historians, in turn, nurtured alchemical hopes of coaxing plants into new climate zones, but they did not envision a leap into a mineral energy economy. Both types of expertise emerged within the constraints of the advanced organic economy before the industrial age.23

The major disagreement between Smith and the natural historians concerned the resilience and stability of nature. Smith read natural history selectively in order to underscore the benign operation of natural systems across the globe. His concrete discussions of agriculture, climate, and soil tended to assume a relatively simple and orderly world. This environmental stability was the ultimate guarantor of the success of market exchange. The physiocratic motto “Laissez-faire, laissez-passer” was no empty metaphor. Free trade was the only way to let nature follow its own course.24 In contrast, natural historians assumed a complex and fragile world in which the self-regulating properties of natural systems could be disrupted. To a great degree, this perception reflected the European encounter with new climate zones and habitats. In part, it also registered the convulsions of the colonization process, ranging from famine and epidemics to resource depletion and falling biodiversity. For example, Kalm reported that both cattle and people degenerated perceptibly in the New World. He also insisted that the population of many species of birds and fish had fallen rapidly since European settlement had begun there. Yet natural historians were not offering a revolutionary critique of colonialism so much as a call for imperial reform. Their alarm justified a self-serving appeal to natural history as the optimal tool of the colonial state in managing ecosystems on the periphery. Ecological crisis was the engine of such paternalism.25

For Smith, environmental differences of climate and soil functioned primarily as justifications for exchange. Drawing on a tradition reaching back to Plutarch, he suggested that the distribution of resources and climate zones across the world made trade rational and desirable.26 Was any ordinary consumer prepared to pay for “claret and burgundy” made in Scotland? “By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland.” But the wine made from them would cost thirty times more than the French equivalent. Import substitution was irrational when natural disadvantages could be overcome through trade.27 Clearly, Smith's argument ridiculed the experiments of natural historians. His Scottish contemporary John Hope worked hard to acclimatize valuable plants to the Scottish climate in the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh. His hothouses were crowded with wilting exotics. Smith's justification of exchange dismissed moral climatology as a distraction. The best response to the challenge of natural disadvantage was not to ameliorate the climate or conserve resources but to establish liberal conditions of trade.28 However, Smith was never impervious to the force of ecological exchange. He was clearly aware of the historical process of the Columbian exchange. In the course of his critique of mercantilism, he stressed that tobacco—the cornerstone of Chesapeake agriculture—could be grown just as well in the British Isles and had in fact been a relatively successful domestic crop until the Crown outlawed its cultivation in the seventeenth century. When the Scottish physician Charles Jackson and his allies began trials of tobacco cultivation outside Glasgow during the War of American Independence, they turned to Smith for support and asked him to analyze the punitive effects of customs duties on their enterprise.29

Smith's vision of ecological exchange was in fact profoundly subversive. He wrote in The Wealth of Nations that “potatoes and maize” were “the two most important improvements which the agriculture of Europe … [had] received from the great extension of its commerce and navigation.” Whereas the great cash crops had generated riches only for the merchants and planters protected by the Navigation Acts, these humble crops could bring benefits to the nation as a whole. If the potato “ever [became] … the common and favourite vegetable food of the people,” it would be possible “to maintain a much greater number of people” on lands where grain was now grown. Smith spoke with startling intensity about the wondrous bodies of Irish porters and prostitutes who had been raised exclusively on a diet of potatoes—“the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions.” In this rather curious way, he used ecological exchange to undercut the importance of colonial cash crops in favor of a more demotic vision of Atlantic agriculture. He probably also saw the productivity of potato crops as a form of superior “food security” against the threat of dearth, though he was quick to emphasize that potatoes could not be stored for years in granaries like surplus wheat.30

A fundamental assumption about the abundance of soil fertility underpinned Smith's account of agriculture: “No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer … In agriculture too nature labours along with man; and though her labour costs no expence, its produce has its value.” Livestock and soil fertility constituted an order of creative labor distinct from its human counterpart. Smith's language here stressed the relative autonomy of natural fertility, a force that did not need much improvement, except to steer it toward a particular social or political aim. There was a strong echo here of physiocratic thinkers such as Quesnay: “Thus the origin, the principle of all expense, and of all wealth, is the fertility of the land.”31 This “free” gift of nature was the source of a continuous surplus that made agriculture superior to manufacturing production.

It is the work of nature which remains after deducting … everything which can be regarded as the work of man. It is seldom less than a fourth, and frequently more than a third of the whole produce. No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction. In them nature does nothing; man does all.32

Yet Smith's theory was not reductionist in the style of the French physiocrats. Unlike them, he did not disparage manufacturing as a sterile and parasitical sector of the economy. Rather, he regarded growth as a dialectical process, involving the mutually supportive development of urban manufactures and agriculture. He laid out the case for such integrated growth in the chapter “Of the Natural Progress of Opulence.” The lesson of his parable was that economic growth emerged by stages from a process of gradual adjustments and positive feedback.33

Smith rooted his parable in a detailed discussion of the relation between agricultural prices, livestock, and crops. Cattle and beef here played the role of civilizing agents. As long as the price of cattle was allowed to fluctuate freely in response to supply and demand, what Smith termed “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” such fluctuations offered sufficient incentive for farmers to find more effective and rational forms of land use. The greater the demand for beef, the more reason farmers had to increase the size of their herds and improve breeds. The demand for beef also encouraged the improvement of pastureland. By introducing and carefully cultivating “artificial grasses” such as white clover and alfalfa, farmers increased the yield of grazing land, thus feeding larger herds than before. The final decisive effect of a high cattle price was its influence on soil fertility. Before the expansion of cattle herds, farmers relied on town ordure—“night soil”—to increase the productivity of the land. With expanding cattle herds, farms became self-sufficient in manure. Only then could grain-producing fields reach their full capacity in terms of yield. As food production increased, the population grew, and with it the division of labor and the opulence of commercial society. Here Smith introduced the case of Scottish cattle prices before and after the Union of Scotland and England in 1707. He linked the question of improvement directly to a defense of free trade and political integration. When the two countries were joined into a unified market, English demand for Scottish beef drove up prices to unprecedented levels. The boost to the droving business, in turn, laid a new foundation for the improvement of agriculture in the Scottish Lowlands. Indeed, the boom in manure increased the grain production that fed growing populations in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Beef, dung, and Union were the true engines of progress: without high cattle prices, there would be no surplus manure and no Scottish Enlightenment.34

For Smith, the same dynamic relation of cattle, fertility, and improvement applied to the colonial periphery. Here he turned to Kalm's natural history of North America for support. While Smith agreed with Kalm that the early settlers had adopted wasteful practices, he insisted that the problem could be remedied through the spread of efficient markets. It is crucial to notice how his trust in market exchange displaced questions of local knowledge and naturalist expertise. This is to say that Smith asserted the equivalence of Scottish Lowland and North American husbandry without offering a causal mechanism or empirical evidence to demonstrate this link. The central tension between superabundant land and good husbandry in Kalm's account, a theme that would fuel American debates about agriculture into the nineteenth century and beyond, went unnoticed in Smith's discussion of colonial cattle. Tellingly, the anonymous work American Husbandry (1775) carried the consequences of Kalm's critique to their logical conclusion by calling for a botanic garden on the model of the Dutch East India Company in the British colonies.35 In contrast, Smith made no mention of Kalm's inventory of native grasses or his advice about introducing English perennials. True, he noted the significance of artificial grasses in the improvement of British husbandry elsewhere in The Wealth of Nations. But if the introduction of new forage plants was the reason for his confidence, he did not bother to make his assumption explicit. Smith simply adopted a universal stadial model of natural growth. This connected logically with his “Greek” ideal of colonization: British settlements overseas should be treated as embryonic metropoles. Given sufficient autonomy of development, they would eventually follow the “natural progress of opulence” to reach the liberty and prosperity of the mother country.36

The problem of famine relief arguably posed the greatest political challenge to any liberal account of nature. Smith's views on famine policy were shaped by the peculiar circumstances of the English economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from some remote pockets of the northern uplands, England had not experienced a widespread famine since the sixteenth century thanks to increased agricultural production and integrated market systems. The Scottish Lowlands crossed the same threshold after the “lean years” of the 1690s. But a pattern of recurring famine persisted on the Continent and in the colonies. It was in this dual context that bold new arguments for free trade as the best defense against famine gained strength. David Hume and Charles Smith championed a liberal approach after the English dearth of 1756. During the 1760s, the French government swung toward laissez-faire as well, under the influence of François Quesnay and other physiocrats. This movement was crowned by the sophisticated liberal critique of famine relief put forward by Smith, A. R. J. Turgot, and the Marquis de Condorcet between 1770 and 1776.37

Against popular conspiracy theories of grain-hoarding middlemen, Smith insisted that the interest of the domestic grain merchant “and that of the great body of the people” were “even in years of the greatest scarcity, exactly the same.” Only free exchange could calibrate the “daily, weekly, and monthly consumption” of the people to a point “proportioned as exactly as possible to the supply of the season.” The corn merchant acted as the direct representative of nature, forcing the poor to moderate their consumption when scarcity dictated so, instilling habits of “thrift and good management” among the lower ranks. Conversely, Smith assumed that a corn merchant who raised “the price of his corn somewhat higher than the scarcity of the season require[d]” would “suffer the most by this excess of avarice” since he would be left with stock unsold at the end of the shortage. All of these arguments shared the presupposition that agricultural mastery of nature was fundamentally sufficient and irreversible, and, by implication, that the natural order was fundamentally benign. Smith categorically denied that harvest failure might cause a famine in the wheat-growing regions of Europe if free exchange prevailed. “In an extensive corn country, between all the different parts of which there is a free commerce and communication, the scarcity occasioned by the most unfavourable seasons can never be so great as to produce a famine.” Smith claimed a historical warrant for his assertion. After careful study of “the history of the dearths and famines … of Europe,” he was certain that “famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting … to remedy the inconveniencies of a dearth.”38

This historical inference was equally a claim about the natural world. While contemporary natural historians such as Poivre worried about climate change and soil erosion, Smith's model assumed a stable and bountiful natural order immune to large-scale disaster, in which cycles of abundance and scarcity followed an essentially moderate path between extremes. In contrast, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and Malthus would take a far more melancholy view of the environment just a generation later, in the aftermath of the 1795–1796 dearth. But Smith's assumption about the stability of the natural order made it possible to challenge one of the traditional justifications for the paternalist state: the strategic imperative of the grain police. For centuries, the state had reacted to dearth by regulating the grain trade and maintaining public granaries. Smith's interpretation of nature replaced the moral economy of the paternalist state with ecological stability as the guarantor of free exchange. It is true that he granted an exception to the rule in cases of “most urgent necessity.” Yet this should be understood as an expression of his political pragmatism rather than a recognition that agricultural yield might collapse.39

For Smith, the political etiology of famine extended beyond Europe to major food-producing regions around the globe. His main example here was the case of the Bengal famine of 1770. Bengal had been formally annexed by the British in 1765 when the Mughal emperor Shah Alam granted the East India Company the right of Diwani—the direct administration of land revenues throughout the province. The prosperity of Bengal stemmed in great part from its thriving wet rice agriculture. The eastern Bengal delta had been reclaimed and deforested by cultivators during Mughal rule in the seventeenth century. Government incentives for land reclamation together with the natural irrigation of the seasonal floods in the estuary helped create one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world. Yet this political ecology was still vulnerable to dearth and famine. Population growth, price fluctuations, and ecological oscillations endangered the subsistence of ordinary farmers. To safeguard the social order, the Mughal Empire expended considerable resources on famine relief.40 After the British annexation of Bengal, the new regime of unregulated revenue extraction diminished the ability of the native population to withstand a subsistence crisis while the old scheme of state-sponsored famine relief was neglected. When drought struck the region in 1769, two consecutive rice harvests failed, in December 1769 and March 1770. The famine began in Bihar and then spread to Bengal. The price of rice rose precipitously to a peak of tenfold the regular level. Contemporary estimates of mortality varied greatly, since there were no firm population figures for Bengal in the first place. A report by Warren Hastings in 1772 assessed losses at one-third of the inhabitants. In London, the initial newspaper references ranged from 600,000 to 3,000,000 dead. Later statisticians have concluded that the true number may have been closer to 10,000,000.41

News of the disaster provoked a furious response among critics and would-be reformers of the East India Company. The radical Middlesex Journal called for a “steady and moderate administration, disinterested Governors, and above all, a suspension of the spirit of avarice and rapine.” Smith's reaction was close in spirit. The Wealth of Nations used the famine to indict the Company's trading practices. Rice countries were fundamentally similar to the corn countries of Europe, despite the greater vulnerability of the former to drought on account of the higher levels of water required for rice paddy cultivation. “Even in such countries, however, the drought is, perhaps, scarce ever so universal as necessarily to occasion a famine, if the government would allow a free trade.” Smith surmised that “improper regulations” and “injudicious restraints imposed by the servants of the East India Company upon the rice trade, contributed, perhaps, to turn [the 1769] dearth into a famine.” Elsewhere, Smith reinforced this political characterization of the Bengal famine by suggesting that falling wages of labor among the common people caused by the tyranny and monopoly of the Company were a precipitate cause of the starvation. He contrasted famine-ridden Bengal, dominated by a “mercantile company which oppresses and domineers,” to the flourishing agriculture of the North American colonies, where no chartered company monopolized trade. He also underscored the “super-abundance” of rice production, noting that it yielded two or sometimes three crops a year and therefore sustained a much greater population than corn lands.42 Although Smith's argument was brief and was tempered by caveats, it was absolutely crucial to his case. By eliminating environmental difference from the equation, he was able to defend the establishment of homogeneous liberal principles of governance across the empire. This argument from environmental equivalence proved very influential with later administrators and economic writers.

The significance of Smith's position becomes clearer when we compare it to the rival perspective. Ideas of hydraulic management flourished in the wake of the famine. Early examples include the sharp attack on the East India Company appended to Alexander Dow's 1772 edition of The History of Hindostan and Henry Pattullo's proposal for reform of the land revenues of Bengal. These works helped pave the way for the passage of the East India Act of 1773, the first attempt to regulate revenue administration in Bengal. They also sowed the seeds of the Permanent Settlement in 1793.43 For both Dow and Pattullo, the question of famine relief was central to their vision of a reformed East India Company. They emphasized that famines brought on by drought were cyclical phenomena in the history of India: “no country has in all ages been more subject to scarcities, and even to famine.” Robert Orme reached the same conclusion regarding agriculture in the Carnatic: “vast reservoirs” were necessary to “supply the defect of rain during the dry season of the year.” Only the state could shoulder the high costs of such precautions. Dow and Pattullo, in turn, stressed the vital role of public granaries as the best resort in times of dearth.44

These early proponents of famine relief set a standard for a generation of natural historians in the service of the East India Company. David Arnold has argued that the Bengal famine represents a fundamental rupture in British views of South Asia. It “helped propagate an image of India as a land still subject to the capricious sway of nature and as a society too feeble and fatalistic to fend for itself.”45 Beginning in the middle of the 1780s, the naturalist Banks gained increasing influence within British India. From his headquarters in London, he established a network of colonial experts and botanic gardens, including the Scots Robert Kyd and William Roxburgh in Calcutta as well as their countryman James Anderson in Madras. These surgeon-botanists enjoyed the support of Governor-General Lord Cornwallis and the president of the Board of Control, Henry Dundas. Meanwhile, allies in Britain such as Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Greville publicized the mission of the natural historians in the metropole. Greville stressed the need for “constant superintendance” in order to “avert … calamities arising from physical causes.” Drought, floods, and other “irregularities of the seasons” caused “perpetual changes in the produce of agriculture,” which in turn led to a great “frequency of revolutions in government” and “variations in the state of population.” All political arrangements had to be provisional and flexible. Natural oscillations “must require inevitably a periodical valuation of the laws.” The same spirit of pragmatism fueled an explicit critique of Adam Smith penned by Sir Joseph Banks in 1799. Banks complained bitterly about Smith's increasing influence in government circles: “every page proves him to be absolutely unpractical in the ways of men.” Only a fool would trust the “infallibility of his maxims.”46

In practice, the management of British India involved several compatible aims. It conferred on the colonial state a primary obligation to monitor and husband grain and water. A massive public granary was constructed near Patna in 1786. The settlement of 1793 made the Board of Control and directors of the East India Company responsible for the “general superintendance” of river embankments and the collection of “water in tanks or reservoirs during the rainy season.” Greville compared the Ganges to the Euphrates, observing that “enlightened conquerors” might have been able to preserve the fertility of Mesopotamia down to the present. Roxburgh oversaw the establishment of a series of water tanks for famine relief in the vicinity of Calcutta in 1791. Some observers were pessimistic about the possibilities for control. After measuring the tremendous velocity of the Ganges, James Rennell counseled against any project to straighten the river: “Next to earthquakes, perhaps the flood of tropical rivers produces the quickest alterations in the face of the globe.”47

The hydrological imperative was connected to the necessity of meteorological observation. Thomas Forrest proposed an early theory of monsoon patterns in 1783. James Anderson, in turn, identified a zone between 16 and 18 degrees of latitude prone to drought over a thirty-year period. Robert Kyd's 1791 survey of the western side of the Hooghly River offered a detailed account of the relation between the harvest cycle and local weather patterns. Francis Buchanan Hamilton made careful notes on the use of embankments and water tanks in his survey of Bengal from 1807. In this way, British naturalists began to disaggregate European generalizations about India in favor of a new, more nuanced delineation of plant geography and climate. Politically, such quantification served to undermine Smith's “Greek” ideal of ecological equivalence between corn lands and rice countries. In the same spirit, naturalists linked climate research to a focus on agricultural diversification. Since the widespread reliance on rice rendered the population particularly vulnerable to crop failure, Kyd, Roxburgh, and Anderson promoted the adoption of alternative types of food. Kyd founded the botanic garden of Calcutta in 1786 to serve in part as a research station to promote drought-resistant plants.48

Supporters of Smith were slower to mount a defense of free grain markets in Bengal. The Wealth of Nations gained wide public recognition only after Smith's death in 1790. H. T. Colebrooke's Remarks on the Present State of the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal (1795) offered an early extension of Smith's argument about free trade but affected an uneasy silence on the question of famine relief. His one gesture toward the problem came in a brief discussion of the physical peculiarities of the region, when he acknowledged the extreme fluctuations in the price of rice and corn, even in a year “without famine or scarcity.” The former governor-general, Warren Hastings, presented a variation on Smith's argument in a letter to the prominent politician Henry Dundas written in the winter of 1800. There was little reason, he said, to believe that “any well regulated state was ever visited by such a dearth as, of its own necessity, to cause a famine, from a deficiency or failure of the natural products of the soil.” He insisted that the lessons he had learned from the Bengal famine of 1783 could be directly applied to the current subsistence crisis in the British metropole. The main priority of the government in a time of dearth was to ensure that grain supplies reached the market and to circulate accounts of the quantities available. Such information would also render “people of the lower classes of society … more quiet under an evil which arose from the dispensation of Providence.”49

Around the same time, T. R. Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population pushed the question of famine relief into new territory. While he parted ways with Smith by focusing on deficiencies in the food supply as the true cause of famines, he also asserted that famines constituted an unfortunate but natural check on excess population. However, this callous position was circumscribed by considerable caveats. During the course of the Napoleonic Wars, Malthus openly defended restrictions on the trade of grain for the sake of national security and social stability. He also acknowledged Colebrooke's point about a basic ecological difference between Bengal and England. Famines were more common in India because rice prices fluctuated more than grain prices. Yet despite these gestures toward nuance and particularity, the function of nature for Malthus remained essentially negative. It was not a force to be explored and mastered. The best strategy of famine relief was to discourage early marriage rather than to penetrate the secrets of the monsoon or reestablish Mughal water-management methods. Malthus's fundamental orientation is evident from a set of queries he drafted about India in 1804 for the benefit of his friend James Mackintosh. The long list focused almost exclusively on vital statistics, not questions of environmental conditions.50

The rising credibility of political economy was confirmed by the appointment of Malthus to the East India Company training college in Haileybury in 1805. New Scottish administrators such as Thomas Munro and Mountstuart Elphinstone further reinforced this trend. During the famine of 1812 in western India, they adopted a non-interventionist policy in direct conflict with the earlier priorities of public granaries and natural knowledge. They favored a simplistic form of classical political economy that ignored what hints of circumspection and hesitation there were in Malthus and Smith. This stance extended into other realms of colonial administration. Munro rejected state protection of forests in 1815 in favor of free markets in wood fuel and timber, according to Gregory Barton. S. Ambirajan suggests that such vulgar liberalism exerted a hegemonic dominance until the 1860s.51

But the picture seems far less straightforward if we consider the uneven application of liberal principles and the resistance of environmental expertise to laissez-faire. Irrigation, railways, and forestry were all privileged spaces of state intervention, as Manu Goswami reminds us. Barton notes that ideas of forest conservation were ascendant in 1807–1823, 1831, and again after 1845. Botanists such as Alexander Gibson played a critical role in these efforts. It was Gibson who pioneered a new model of scientific empire forestry with his management of the teak forests in Ni-lambur. J. F. Thomas, an administrator connected to the circles of naturalist-surgeons, led the charge against Smithian famine policy. In response to the devastating famine of 1837–1838, Thomas reasserted the ecological difference of the Raj: “Much of the reasoning of Smith appears to me inapplicable to [India], or to any tropical country in an early stage of civilization.” For Elizabeth Whitcombe, the Madras famine served to galvanize a new wave of hydraulic colonialism. Only districts with extensive irrigation were capable of coping adequately with the disaster. Officials concluded that hydraulic infrastructure would present an effective relief measure and invested £3 million in the Ganges Canal project, which opened in 1854. Famine relief became linked to a new form of expert authority: the canal engineer. Ironically, the push for irrigation generated a series of secondary problems with waterlogging, the spread of malaria, and the buildup of mineral salts. Indeed, British engineering schemes were fundamentally inadequate and in fact counterproductive at the level of local water management. Colonial administrators sought quick and large-scale technical fixes rather than a precise understanding of how local ecology and social structures were intertwined. Most fundamentally, these men wielded a power unconstrained by democratic accountability and national citizenship. Only after independence did India break the vicious pattern of recurring famine.52

It is possible to trace the rival ecologies of the Enlightenment into the age of modern development. The improvement of nature has remained the foundation of economic growth even as it has been overlaid by other priorities such as education, public health, urban planning, and the preservation of custom. Yet despite these manifold changes, development schemes have followed the fundamental oscillation between liberal dogma and statist expertise.53 If current predictions about climate change, peak oil, biodiversity depletion, and other environmental disruptions are realized, the problem of economic growth will increasingly become a question of applied environmental science. Arguably, the rival ecologies of enlightened thought still define the basic binary approaches to environmental change. Neoliberal economists predict that the power of the market will overcome natural adversity and usher in technological fixes. Indeed, their faith in the rationality of the price signal still assumes a quasi-providential fit between markets and nature. But Smith's pessimism about the agricultural limits to growth has no purchase here.54 They seem incapable of imagining an environmental problem so dire that it threatens the economic system with collapse or permanent physical constraints to development. In this system of belief, there will always be sufficient time for the market to respond to changing material conditions. Meanwhile, environmental critics warn with increasing vehemence of planetary apocalypse but often show little grasp of the social and political ramifications of their own arguments. Some call for a stationary state of bounded national or local economies to escape the problems of growth. Others now openly investigate the viability of “geo-engineering” on a global scale as a remedy of last resort. Frequently, their proposed remedies rest on an appeal to a universal government of reason. Such political abstraction in the name of species solidarity may pave the way for new regimes of enlightened despotism.55 Above all, it risks naturalizing ecological vulnerability rather than framing it as a problem of social justice. In such a world, environmental science might once again become the handmaiden of empire.

1

Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America: Containing Its Natural History, and a Circumstantial Account of Its Plantations and Agriculture in General, trans. John Reinhold Forster, 3 vols. (Warrington, 1770–1771), 1: 31; Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986), 11.

2

Sverker Sörlin and Otto Fagerstedt, Linné och hans apostlar (Stockholm, 2004), 57–66; Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 113–123; Staffan Müller-Wille, “Walnuts at Hudson Bay, Coral Reefs in Gotland: The Colonialism of Linnaean Botany,” in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, 2005), 34–48; John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 2003), 98–107; Frans A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of Their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735–1789 (Utrecht, 1971), 199–240; Charles Withers, “Improvement and Enlightenment: Agriculture and Natural History in the Works of the Rev. Dr. John Walker (1731–1803),” in Peter Jones, ed., Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1988), 102–116; Withers, “Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place,” History Workshop Journal 39, no. 1 (1995): 137–167; A. G. Morton, John Hope, 1725–1786: Scottish Botanist (Edinburgh, 1986); Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Adam Smith in the Forest,” in Susanna Hecht and Kathleen Morrison, eds., The Social Life of the Forest (Chicago, forthcoming); E. C. Spary, Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, 2000); Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995).

3

Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge, 1996), 93, 107–109, 116–121.

4

Koerner, Linnaeus, 48–49; Sten Lindroth, Kungl. Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Historia, 1739–1818, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1967), 1: 258–260; Pehr Kalm, Pehr Kalms Brev till Friherre Sten Carl Bielke, ed. Carl Skottberg (Åbo, 1960), 12, 47, 56–57; Martti Kerkkonen, Peter Kalm's North American Journey: Its Ideological Background and Results (Helsinki, 1959), 40.

5

Kalm, Travels into North America, 1: 102–103, 184–186, 343–345; 2: 192–195; 3: 5–7, 241–243; cf. William Byrd, William Byrd's Natural History of Virginia; or, The Newly Discovered Eden, ed. Richmond Croom Beatty and William J. Mulloy (Richmond, Va., 1940), 18; Carolus Linnaeus, Pan Svecicus (Uppsala, 1749), partly translated in Benjamin Stillingfleet, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick (London, 1759), 184–201, a book that was owned by Adam Smith. On the cameralist structure of Linnaean natural history, see Koerner, Linnaeus; Lisbet Rausing, “Underwriting the Oeconomy: Linnaeus on Nature and Mind,” in Margaret Schabas and Neil De Marchi, eds., Oeconomies in the Age of Newton (Durham, N.C., 2003), 173–203; Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005), 30–31. Linnaeus's other disciple, Anders Sparrman, commented on the extirpation of grasses by cattle in the Cape Colony; see William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock and the Environment, 1770–1950 (Oxford, 2003), 66–68. On the colonial American cattle frontier, see Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004). Brian Donahue's microhistory of Concord suggests that New England farmers were careful husbandmen; The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 92, 208.

6

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [hereafter WN], ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976), 1: 167 (artificial grasses), 240–241, 245 (North America).

7

Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000), xv–xvi, xviii, 272; cf. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Introduction,” in Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History (Berkeley, Calif., 2009), 10–11; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 58–59; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 2.

8

I use the word “ecology” here as shorthand for eighteenth-century terms such as the “economy of nature.” For the semantic range of this term, see Emma Spary, “Political, Natural and Bodily Economies,” in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996), 178–196; Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1994); Frank N. Egerton, “Changing Concepts of the Balance of Nature,” Quarterly Review of Biology 48, no. 2 (June 1973): 322–350; John Kricher, The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth (Princeton, N.J., 2009); Richard W. Judd, The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740–1840 (Cambridge, 2009), 187–190.

9

Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2005), 154–155; Koerner, Linnaeus, 1. Both writers tend to see free trade as inherently anti-imperialist. In both theory and practice, this may be an untenable position.

10

Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics, 67–68, 70–71, 105–110; Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1994), 187–189, 605–610; Koerner, Linnaeus, 15, 25–26, 39–40; Grove, Green Imperialism, 188, 198, 206, 219–221; David Mackay, “Agents of Empire: The Banksian Collectors and Evaluation of New Lands,” in David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge, 1996), 38–57; Michael Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science,” in Jardine, Secord, and Spary, Cultures of Natural History, 287–304.

11

Koerner, Linnaeus, 4–5; Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, 105; Drayton, Nature's Government, 108–121; Spary, Utopia's Garden; Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn., 2007); E. R. Brann, The Political Ideas of Alexander von Humboldt: A Brief Preliminary Study (Madison, Wis., 1954); Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York, 2006), 82–85; Keith Thomson, A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History (Monticello, Va., 2008).

12

Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972); Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, Tex., 2006).

13

John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 1998), 142–144; Alan Frost, “The Antipodean Exchange: European Horticulture and Imperial Designs,” in Miller and Reill, eds., Visions of Empire, 58–79; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 2–3.

14

Koerner, Linnaeus, 82–85; Grove, Green Imperialism, chap. 5; Pierre Poivre, Voyages d'un philosophe, ou, Observations sur les moeurs & les arts des peuples de l'Afrique, de l'Asie et de l'Amerique (Yverdon, 1768); Gregory A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2002), 47; Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa, 28; T. C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600 (Edinburgh, 2000), 37; Jonsson, “Adam Smith in the Forest”; Judd, The Untilled Garden.

15

Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1967); Alessa Johns, ed., Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (New York, 1999); Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore, 2005); Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham, N.C., 2008); William Robertson, The History of America, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1780), 1: 20; Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (Chicago, 2009).

16

Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 658–663; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (December 1982): 1262–1289; Müller-Wille, “Walnuts at Hudson Bay,” 42–43; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Mark Catesby, a Skeptical Newtonian in America,” in Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard, eds., Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 47–51; Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), 323; Theodore S. Feldman, “Late Enlightenment Meteorology,” in Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds., The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 143–197; Feldman, “The Ancient Climate in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century,” in Michael Shortland, ed., Science and Nature: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Chalfont St. Giles, 1993), 23–40; Marie-Noëlle Bourget, “Measurable Difference: Botany, Climate, and the Gardener's Thermometer in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, 270–286; Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago, 2007), 170–202; Anya Zilberstein, “Biogeography and the Northern Environments of Empire” (paper presented at the American Society of Environmental History Conference, March 13, 2010); Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science”; Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 45.

17

WN, 1: 259 (Columbian exchange), 174 (tobacco), 177, 259 (potato), 237–240 (cattle), 169 (kitchen gardening), 111–113 (stationary state), 363–364 (soil fertility), 527 (drought), 254 (silver mines), 586 (plow on plantations).

18

WN, 1: 258 (land), 380 (capital), 376 (opulence). A count of some frequent keywords in the text offers a rough sense of how closely linked commerce and agriculture were in Smith: “trade” (312), “corn” (147), “nature” (125), “merchants” (103), “agriculture” (74), “cattle” (72) (multiple hits for some pages). The word-search data is taken from the 1776 London edition of WN in the digital collection The Making of the Modern World: Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450–1850, http://gdc.gale.com; cf. Edward Puro, “Use of the Term ‘Natural’ in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations,” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 9 (1992): 73–86.

19

Smith's views on agriculture have been examined by a number of scholars, including Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, “Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations,” in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 389–443; E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” in Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993), 185–258; Thompson, “The Moral Economy Reviewed,” ibid., 259–351; David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley, Calif., 1988); Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), 80–89, 175–185; Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London, 1978); E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988), 47–50; Wrigley, “The Limits to Growth: Malthus and the Classical Economists,” Population and Development Review 14 (1985): 30–48; John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), 390–392; Vernard Foley, The Social Physics of Adam Smith (West Lafayette, Ind., 1976); Stefano Fiori, “Visible and Invisible Order: The Theoretical Duality of Smith's Political Economy,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 8 (2001): 429–448; Colin A. M. Duncan, “Adam Smith's Green Vision and the Future of Global Socialism,” in Robert Albritton, Shannon Bell, John R. Bell, and Richard Westra, eds., New Socialisms: Futures beyond Globalization (New York, 2004), 90–104; Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics, 88, 92. For our purposes, the title of Andrew Skinner's article “Natural History in the Age of Adam Smith” is something of a red herring. Skinner deals almost exclusively with the emergence of a Scottish school of stadial history rather than problems of the natural world in Smith. Skinner, “Natural History in the Age of Adam Smith,” Political Studies 15, no. 1 (1967): 32–48. A similar approach is taken by Paul B. Wood, “The Science of Man,” in Jardine, Secord, and Spary, Cultures of Natural History, 197–210.

20

WN, 1: 236 (Pliny), 240 (Kalm), 173 (Poivre), 243 (Buffon); 2: 560 (Buffon). Simon Schaffer, “The Earth's Fertility as a Social Fact in Early Modern England,” in Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson, eds., Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1997), 138–141; The Edinburgh Review, for the Year 1755, 2nd ed. (London, 1818), 128–129; Brian Dalgety Bonnyman, “Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Third Duke of Buccleuch, William Keir, and the Buccleuch Estates, 1751–1812” (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 2004), chaps. 3 and 7; Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995); for some contacts between Black, Cullen, and Home, see Edinburgh University Library [hereafter EUL], Gen 873/1–4; Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 1992), 11–49; James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment—Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind (New York, 2003), 272–277; James Hutton, “Elements of Agriculture,” National Library of Scotland [hereafter NLS], MS 23165; for the reference to The Wealth of Nations, see 236/684 and 256/704; Jean Jones, “James Hutton's Agricultural Research and His Life as a Farmer,” Annals of Science 42 (1985): 573–601; Charles Withers, “On Georgics and Geology: James Hutton's ‘Elements of Agriculture’ and Agricultural Science in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” Agricultural History Review 42, no. 1 (1994): 38–48.

21

Gary M. Anderson, William F. Shughart II, and Robert D. Tollison, “Adam Smith in the Customhouse,” Journal of Political Economy 93, no. 4 (1985): 740–759. For the letter from Smith to Black, see EUL, Gen 873/III 7–8.

22

On the porous boundaries between economic and natural models in the Enlightenment, see Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics. For the blending of moral philosophy and economic analysis, see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Boston, 2001).

23

WN, 1: 332; for a discussion of positive feedback, see Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, 45–46; Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics, 29–31, 91–92, 94–95; Rausing, “Underwriting the Oeconomy,” 185–186, 188, 191. On the preindustrial notion of physical limits to growth in Smith, see Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, 47–50. The strength of Smith's teleological and providentialist tendencies is a subject of ongoing debate; see Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge, 2009), 183–184; A. M. C. Waterman, “Economics as Theology: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations,” Southern Economic Journal 68, no. 4 (2002): 907–921.

24

Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics, 49.

25

Kalm, Travels into North America, 1: 102–104, 291–293. Cf. the discussion of “crisis” as a political rather than ecological concept in “AHR Conversation: Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1456–1457, 1462.

26

Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 11; Jacob Viner, Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics, ed. Douglas A. Irwin (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 42.

27

WN, 1: 458.

28

National Archives of Scotland, GD 253/144/3/25 (notes on tea transfer), GD 253/144/7a/90 (tea in 1775); John Hope, Catalogus arborum et fruticum in horto Edinensi crescentium anno 1778 (Edinburgh, 1778), 20.

29

WN, 1: 174; NLS, MS 11198, f. 121–122; Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, 1993), 63; Robert Douglas, General View of the Agriculture in the Counties of Roxburgh and Selkirk, with Observations on the Means of Their Improvement (Edinburgh, 1798), 105–106.

30

WN, 1: 259, 177; Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), 359, 496.

31

Quesnay quoted in Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, 96.

32

WN, 1: 363–364. See also ibid., 427; Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 522.

33

WN, 1: 376–380, 343–344. For Smith's critique of the physiocrats, see ibid., 2: 686–687; Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, 46; Wrigley, “The Limits to Growth.”

34

WN, 1: 167, 237–240, 411–427; 2: 687. See also 1: 408–409 on the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton as “the offspring of agriculture.”

35

WN, 1: 240–241, 245; anonymous [possibly Arthur Young], American Husbandry, 2 vols. (London, 1775), 1: 144–149, 275–276; on the tension between frontier expansion and good husbandry, see Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002). On the spread of grasses, see Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 156–163.

36

WN, 1: 167 (artificial grasses). For the ideal of Greek colonization, see 2: 556, 593–594.

37

David R. Raynor, “Who Invented the Invisible Hand?” Times Literary Supplement, August 14, 1998, 22; Hont and Ignatieff, “Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations,” 404–405; Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, 72–86.

38

Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 199–200, 263; WN, 1: 524–526. Smith owed some of his data on grain markets to Lord Hailes; see Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford, 1977), 139, 145–150.

39

WN, 1: 539. Hont and Ignatieff argue that Smith saw manufacturing and international trade as the best means to move “forever beyond the closed limits of nature”; “Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations,” 414. Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, Originally Presented to the Right Hon. William Pitt, in the Month of November, 1795 (London, 1800), 17–18, 44; T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Cambridge, 1992), 42–43; Jeremy Bentham, “Defence of a Maximum,” in Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings, ed. Werner Stark, 3 vols. (London, 1952–1954), 2: 255–258; Thompson, “The Moral Economy Reviewed,” 281 fn. 1; Karl Gunnar Persson, Grain Markets in Europe, 1500–1900: Integration and Deregulation (Cambridge, 2000); Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1976); Nicolas de la Mare, Traité de la police, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1729), 2: 566.

40

John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 2006), 33–34; C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988), 32, 51, 66–67.

41

David Arnold, “Hunger in the Garden of Plenty: The Bengal Famine of 1770,” in Johns, Dreadful Visitations, 81–111; W. W. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal, 5th ed. (London, 1872), Appendix A: “Bengal in 1772, Portrayed by Warren Hastings,” 381; quoted in Arnold, “Hunger in the Garden of Plenty,” 107. The account of the Bengal famine in The Gentleman's Magazine was reprinted in The Annual Register; or, A View of the History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1771 (London, 1772), 205–208. Smith owned a copy of the latter.

42

The Middlesex Journal; or, Chronicle of Liberty, Saturday, August 10, 1771; WN, 1: 91, 527, 223.

43

Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C., 1996), 7.

44

Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, from the Death of Akbar, to the Complete Settlement of the Empire under Aurungzebe (London, 1772), xlvi, 141, 168, 341; Henry Pattullo, An Essay upon the Cultivation of the Lands, and Improvements of the Revenues, of Bengal (London, 1772), 13; Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, from the Year MDCCXLV (London, 1763), 54. Smith stressed the importance of “inland navigation” to the commerce of Bengal but did not go so far as to endorse state management of water. See WN, 1: 35–36; 2: 838.

45

Arnold, “Hunger in the Garden of Plenty,” 82.

46

Charles Francis Greville, British India Analyzed: The Provincial and Revenue Establishments of Tippoo Sultan and of Mahomedan and British Conquerors in Hindostan, Stated and Considered (London, 1793), 498–499; Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, 137–138; Banks quoted ibid., 88. On the shifting perception of Bengal, cf. Arnold, “Hunger in the Garden of Plenty,” 91, 105.

47

Greville, British India Analyzed, 503–504; Alexander Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 2 vols. (London, 1793–1797), 1: ii–iii; 2: 33–34; James Rennell, “An Account of the Ganges and Burrampooter Rivers,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 71 (1781): 98, 100; Tim Robinson, William Roxburgh: The Founding Father of Indian Botany (Chichester, 2008), 187–208.

48

Thomas Forrest, A Treatise on the Monsoons in East-India (London, 1783). See also William Nicholson, Sundry Remarks and Observations Made in a Voyage to the East-Indies, 2nd ed. with additions (London, 1773); William Roxburgh, “A Meteorological Diary, &c. Kept at Fort St. George in the East Indies,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 68 (1778): 180–193; Robert Kyd, “Some Remarks on the Soil and Cultivation of the Western Side of the River Hooghly,” British Library [hereafter BL], Mss Eur 95/1; BL, IOR, Mss Eur D 72, f. 154, 161; Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, 184; Grove, Green Imperialism, 332–335; Richard H. Grove, “Revolutionary Weather: The Climatic and Economic Crisis of 1788–1795 and the Discovery of El Niño,” in Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich, and Will Steffen, eds., Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 151–168; Grove, “The East India Company, the Raj and the El Niño: The Critical Role Played by Colonial Scientists in Establishing the Mechanisms of Global Climate Teleconnections, 1770–1930,” in Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damondaran, and Satpal Sangwan, eds., Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1998), 301–323; Arnold, “Hunger in the Garden of Plenty,” 92; Drayton, Nature's Government, 117; Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, 137; James Anderson, The Conclusion of Letters on the Culture of Silk, with Additional Accounts of Both Kinds of Bread Fruit Trees and the Distribution of Nopal Plants, on the Coast of Coromandel (Madras, 1792), 15; on potatoes, see Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford, 1992), 215–216.

49

Richard F. Teichgraeber, “‘Less abused than I had reason to expect’: The Reception of The Wealth of Nations in Britain, 1776–90,” Historical Journal 30, no. 2 (1987): 337–366; Frank Whitson Fetter, The Economist in Parliament, 1780–1868 (Durham, N.C., 1980); William J. Barber, British Economic Thought and India, 1600–1858: A Study in the History of Development Economics (Oxford, 1975), 86–100; H. T. Colebrooke, Remarks on the Present State of the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal ([Calcutta], 1795), 5, 75; BL, Add MS 29234, f. 80; S. Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge, 1978), 64; cf. Sudipta Sen, “Liberal Empire and Illiberal Trade: The Political Economy of ‘Responsible Government’ in Early British India,” in Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), 139.

50

Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 35, 42–43, 169, 179; Winch, Riches and Poverty, 332–335; T. R. Malthus, “Queries Relative to India, 1804,” BL, Add MS 78784 A, f. 142.

51

Barber, British Economic Thought and India, 146; Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism, 46–47; Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India, 59–61, 67, 70–72.

52

Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, Ohio, 2001); Grove, Green Imperialism, 446–447; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004), 45–61; John F. Thomas, “Notes on the Duty of Government in Periods of Famine,” Madras Journal of Literature and Science 9 (January–June 1839): 209; Elizabeth Whitcombe, “Irrigation,” in D. Kumar and T. Raychaudhuri, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: 1757–1970 (Hyderabad, 1983), 693–695, cited in William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford, 2007), 136–137; Ian Stone, Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy (Cambridge, 1984), 239–277; Grove, Green Imperialism, 383, 423–424, 446, 449. David Gilmartin stresses further tensions between political and scientific priorities in “Scientific Empire and Imperial Science: Colonialism and Irrigation Technology in the Indus Basin,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 4 (1994): 1127–1149; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2001), 331–340; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York, 2000), 168–175, 178–184.

53

David Ludden, “India's Development Regime,” in Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992), 247–287; K. S. Jomo and Erik S. Reinert, The Origins of Development Economics: How Schools of Economic Thought Have Addressed Development (London, 2005); Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, N.C., 2007); Barbara Weinstein, “Presidential Address: Developing Inequality,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (February 2008): 1–18.

54

Malcolm Gillis and Jeffrey R. Vincent, “National Self-Interest in the Pursuit of Sustainable Development,” in Jurgen Schmandt and C. H. Ward, eds., Sustainable Development: The Challenge of Transition (Cambridge, 2000), 11–61; Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge, 2001); on the problem of response time, see Eric Lambin, The Middle Path: Avoiding Environmental Catastrophe, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Chicago, 2007), 158–160.

55

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 211–212, 216–219; Herman E. Daly, “Uneconomic Growth: Empty-World versus Full-World Economics,” in Schmandt and Ward, Sustainable Development, 63–77; Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Peter D. Ward, The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World without Ice Caps (New York, 2010), 202; James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London, 2009), 20, 53, 61–62; Craig Dilworth, Too Smart for Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Mankind (Cambridge, 2009); Jeff Goodell, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate (Boston, 2010); Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York, 2010).

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is Assistant Professor of British History at the University of Chicago. His forthcoming book with Yale University Press explores the environmental foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment and classical political economy.

For encouragement and criticism, I would like to thank T. C. Smout, Sverker Sörlin, Paul Warde, Charles Withers, Thomas Ahnert, John Brewer, Peter Mancall, Minakshi Menon, Ryan Hanley, Anya Zilberstein, and Paul Cheney, as well as audiences at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh), the Huntington Library, Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the 2009 Smith in Glasgow conference at the University of Glasgow. Finally, I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for the AHR for their many insightful comments.

© American Historical Association 2010