ABSTRACT
While historians generally consider the early modern period to encompass the years from 1500 to 1700, we will extend it to 1800. It then includes the scientific, agricultural and English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and culminates in the French Revolution of 1789 and the English industrial revolution that began in the 1780s. This period saw the establishment of a civilization and system of states in Western Europe that became associated with modernity and the West, and that were later to gain world dominance. By rejecting its own traditional culture, the West laid the foundations for a common civilization based on new social and environmental relations, and the new forms of development associated with modernization. These opened up a great technological and material gap between the West and the rest of the world, compelling most other states eventually to modernize themselves. The spread of modern institutions, ideas and techniques had profound effects on the material construction of nature as environments and on its conceptual construction within social and political thought. This chapter examines early modernity’s impact on nature and environmental thought with particular reference to Britain and Europe.
