ABSTRACT
The introduction to Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878 begins with three stories about aesthetics and the environment from the 1960s to the 1980s, to explain the project's contemporary interest. Following this, it lays out the import of each of the three terms in the title and the sequence of the book's argument. “Political economy” is discussed in terms of the Lockean moral foundations of the nineteenth-century discipline bearing that name and its concomitant modes of visualizing territory, “race” is treated historically as a set of purportedly biological capacities and what these were presumed to entail about the right to claim North American terrain, and “the image of Nature” is analyzed according to Charles Taylor's theory of the “social imaginary,” as a way of entrenching values held by nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans by subordinating them to a geographized vision of “Nature.” As a means of situating the arguments in the book's main chapters, which focus on the ways this image of Nature was represented in print and pictures, the literary context and its technological underpinnings are discussed at length.
