Enlightenment’s Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith’s famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.
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Looks at the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment - which gave birth to modern-day environmentalism - and sheds new light on Scottish thinkers such as Carl Linneaus, David Hume and Adam Smith. In this book, the author argues that Smith's defence of free markets was actually based on idealized notions of self-regulating natural systems.
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“Enlightenment’s Frontier is a wonderful work of environmental, intellectual and social history, which will change historical understanding of eighteenth-century Scotland and illuminate contemporary choices about energy and sustainability.”—Emma Rothschild, Harvard University
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780300162547
Publisert
2013-06-18
Utgiver
Vendor
Yale University Press
Vekt
658 gr
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Dybde
25 mm
Aldersnivå
U, P, 05, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Forfatter