Louis Kirk McAuley. The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894

Today, the term ‘ecology’ is too often used as a catch-all to describe any and all things pertaining to nature and the environment. Obscured by this liberal usage is the term’s more specific reference to the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments. In The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894, Louis Kirk McAuley attends to this more precise meaning of ecology, centring its relational character when examining how British and American writers imagined, understood, and represented the interactions between humans, nonhumans, and their environments in imperial settings across the globe. What makes McAuley’s focus on the ‘human–extra-human relations’ confronted in empire writing so compelling is that it signals a decisive move towards a burgeoning version of ecocriticism that views nature relationally first and foremost. This framing aligns his project with the proliferation of work on capitalism as world ecology initiated by Jason Moore, a perspective that highlights the extent to which capitalism has further embedded humanity within the natural world. Indeed, Moore’s articulation of what he calls ‘capitalism in the web of life’ lies at the heart of The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, providing McAuley with his primary interlocutor as well as his governing critical apparatus. In fact, I would venture to say that it is through McAuley’s engagement with Moore that his monograph stages its most important scholarly intervention, framing the literature of empire as a sociocultural project that is fundamentally ecological.

Although his archive spans a nearly 200-year period that mostly predates Ernst Haeckel’s first use of ‘ecology’ in 1866, McAuley identifies something akin to ecological thinking expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American empire writing. Beginning with Woodes Rogers’s early eighteenth-century account of the goats, rats, and cats that inhabited the Juan Fernandez Islands alongside the marooned Alexander Selkirk, McAuley convincingly demonstrates that the travel writing composed amid English (and later American) imperial expansion is ‘riddled’ with instances in which the forms of cohabitation and mutual dependency between humans and their more-than-human counterparts are foregrounded (p. 36). The ecological awareness that McAuley tracks across Anglo-American empire writing manifests in the form of literary accounts of nonhuman ‘interventions’ or ‘invasions’. From the Old World barley Robinson Crusoe finds growing on his island to the migrating land crabs in Leonora Sansay’s The Secret History of San Domingue, the interactions with nonhumans that McAuley examines within the literature of empire are often between imperial subjects and the plants, animals, minerals, and diseases that were transferred to colonial settings as part of an increasingly global capitalism.

Insofar as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were thinking ecologically, McAuley contends that this kind of thinking was prompted by the influx of invasive species facilitated by the Columbian Exchange. The growing presence of Old World species in island colonies from Samoa to St. Christopher forced colonists to contend with ecosystems that were in a state of flux, or as McAuley puts it, ‘unruly natures’. On the one hand, these invasions proved to be disruptive to the literature of empire itself. This occurs most notably in The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing in McAuley’s account of Robert Louis Stevenson’s curious obsession with weeding. According to McAuley, Stevenson’s literary output during his later years in Samoa was shaped—and in some cases suspended—by the relentless growth of invasive plants like Mimosa pudica. On the other hand, these nonhuman interventions also unsettle our contemporary understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature. Even as the Cartesian notion of the separation between mind and body remains the assumed perspective of writers from this period, McAuley shows that such distinctions were never quite so entrenched. In one particularly astute moment, he presents Crusoe’s famed discovery of a footprint on the beach as a rebuke to that Cartesian separation, reading the imprint in the sand as an acknowledgement of humanity’s embeddedness in and inseparability from the natural world, a quintessential example of what Moore calls ‘capitalism-in-nature/nature-in-capitalism’ (p. 78).

While McAuley locates a critique of Anglo-American expansionism in Stevenson’s writing on the ‘creeping’ invasive weeds he contends with in Samoa, he also identifies contexts like the eighteenth-century Caribbean wherein capital uses literary culture to mobilise these invaders towards its own ends. Indeed, one of the more striking, if unsettling, claims offered by McAuley is that the ecological awareness that manifests in British and American empire writing is routinely used as a means of securing capital accumulation and imperial expansion. The environmental thought articulated within this literary tradition functions, in other words, as an instrument of empire, first discursively and then materially aiding and abetting colonial capitalist development throughout this period. In one chapter, McAuley explores the strategic documentation of invasive species throughout the West Indies in poems like James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane and John Singleton’s A General Description of the West-Indian Islands. In these poems, Grainger and Singleton attend to the natural disasters (or as McAuley describes them, ‘unnatural disasters’) precipitated by invasive species like monkeys and rats, respectively, which devastated the local environment, as well as the implementation of sugarcane monoculture, whereby another invasive species—Saccharum—yielded soil exhaustion, flashfloods, and other forms of environmental degradation (p. 143). The didactic character of these poems was such that McAuley frames these texts as conduits of empire, assisting in the exploitation of these landscapes by colonial actors.

In the end, The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing offers what is possibly the most comprehensive engagement with Moore’s account of capitalism as world ecology, showcasing the promise that Moore’s heuristic can hold for the present and future of literary studies. If, in the words of the great Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood, capitalism is at its core a set of social relations, Moore’s work has sought to complicate this narrative by positing this world-historical institution as a set of ecological relations. McAuley, in his latest monograph, effectively mediates these two positions by focusing on the role of literature in conceptualising, authorising, and enacting the forms of social and environmental domination imparted by colonial capitalism.