Abstract
As the previous chapter demonstrated, anxieties about unhealthy environments impelled the transformation of many places in India and Australasia. Park making and tree planting, drainage and anti-pollution legislation attempted to ‘redeem’ unhealthy and fever-laden landscapes. Environmental transformation took place because settlers regarded the healthiness and productiveness of certain landscapes as both inter-related and normal. When settlers altered environments or when they encountered ones that did not conform to aesthetic preferences, anxieties arose, sometimes stimulating conservation and environmental modification to make places healthier and more aesthetically pleasing.
I wonder what John Ruskin would say could he walk out and see the ravages of the Auckland Goths?1
Alfred Sharpe, 1877
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Notes
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S. Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Richard H. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 234–8.
Roy M. MacLeod, ‘Scientific Advice for British India: Imperial Perceptions and Administrative Goals, 1898–1923’, Modern Asian Studies, 9, 3 (1975): 347.
Charles Newman, The Evolution of Medical Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 12–13.
Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 26.
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Donal P. McCracken, Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 132–81.
Michael E. Hoare, Reform in New Zealand Science, 1880–1926 (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1976).
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© 2011 James Beattie
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Beattie, J. (2011). Colonial Aesthetic Anxieties. In: Empire and Environmental Anxiety. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309067_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309067_4
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