Newberry Library British Studies Seminar
Friday, April 4, 2025
3-5 PM CT
Newberry Library, Chicago

Recent scholarship has highlighted the relationship of the British empire to the environment, examining shifts in energy economies, forest management, land transformation, racial capitalism, and imperial extraction. Histories of empire has also shown how these processes transformed the lived experience of families in Britian and throughout its empire. This presentation brings together histories of family and empire, putting them in dialogue with environmental history scholarship. It proposes that the “Anthropocene household” is a productive framework for examining the intersection of environmental change, family, and empire in the long eighteenth century.