Nature Incorporated

Abstract

In a study of nineteenth-century industrialisation in New England, Theodore Steinberg wrote that, whilst Nature had been there all along, historians have largely neglected its role. He accordingly adopted the title Nature Incorporated to emphasise how New England’s productive output had expanded as new technologies were manipulated and applied to the region’s available natural resources. The ‘commodification’ of the water bodies had called for particular management skills. Where land might be fenced off ‘into discrete bundles of commodities’, there was almost invariably complaint from other user-interests of the water being depleted or fouled. Close study and prescription were called for, if such water bodies were to be sustained and the maximum productive value therefore realised (Steinberg 1991).