@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1731},
      author = {Capps, Maura},
      title = {All Flesh Is Grass: Agrarian Improvement and Ecological  Imperialism in Britain's Settler Empire, 1780-1840},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2016-12},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {421},
      abstract = {This dissertation explores the transfer and utilization of  European pasture grasses and other fodder crops in New  South Wales (Australia) and the Cape Colony (South Africa)  in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It  examines attempts in the period directly following the loss  of the thirteen American colonies to replicate the  Enlightenment-era mixed husbandry (based in sown fodder  crops) of the British Isles in these fledgling antipodean  colonies. It calls into question Alfred Crosby’s model of  ecological imperialism (the spread of European biota in  temperate colonial possessions) as a phenomenon occurring  largely outside of official oversight; it destabilizes an  enduring dichotomy in imperial historiography between land  and labor intensive agriculture in the Old World and land  extensive, destructive agriculture in the New World; and it  suggests ways in which to merge scholarship on the  ideological and scientific underpinnings of imperialism  with the actual “groundwork” of settlement. The  dissertation argues that a particular form of agrarian  improvement (grass-based mixed husbandry) was the driving  force of colonial agricultural development in New South  Wales and the Cape in the period between 1780 and 1840, but  that this distinctly metropolitan version of improvement  came into constant conflict with new environmental,  political, economic, and social realities in these  fledgling colonies, as well as with competing models of  improvement (e.g. commercial pastoralism). Ecological  imperialism was highly orchestrated in these two British  colonies; however, in the period before the scientific  governance of nature at the hands of a powerful colonial  state, the combined environmental, political, economic, and  social challenges to mixed husbandry meant that ecological  imperialism was extremely hard-won—if it was won at all.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1731},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1731},
}