New Books

Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property structures and landscape design across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and evolving concepts of plantation and improvement within imperial ideology. Revolutionaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Washington, Arthur Young, Lord Edward FitzGerald and Pierce Butler constructed houses, farms and landscape gardens –many of which have since been forgotten or selectively overlooked. How did the new republics and revolutionaries, having overthrown social hierarchies, translate their principles into spatial form? As the eighteenth-century ideology of improvement was applied to a variety of transatlantic and enslaved environments, new landscape designs were created – stretching from the suburbs of Dublin to the sea islands of the state of Georgia.

Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688–1815

Finola O’Kane

Publication date

June 2023

Dimensions

280 × 245 mm

Pages 304

Illustrations

192

This pioneering book explores how art shaped the nationalisation of the East India Company between the loss of its primary monopoly in 1813 and its ultimate liquidation in 1858. Challenging the idea that parliament drove political reform, it argues instead that the Company’s political legitimacy was destabilised by novel modes of artistic production in colonial India. New artistic forms and practices – the result of new technologies like lithography and steam navigation, middle-class print formats including the periodical, the scrapbook and the literary annual, as well as the prevalence of amateur sketching among Company employees – reconfigured the colonial regime’s racial boundaries and techniques of governance. They flourished within transimperial networks, integrating middle-class societies with new political convictions and moral disciplines, and thereby eroding the aristocratic corporate cultures that had previously structured colonial authority in India.

Unmaking the East India Company:

British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813–1858

Tom Young

Publication date

June 2023

Dimensions

254 × 190 mm

Pages

304 Illustrations

80