Cultivating Wilderness

What is it about?

'Cultivating Wilderness' challenges the idea of wilderness as untouched nature by showing how it was actively produced in eighteenth-century Britain. Focusing on enclosure, landscape design, and class relations, the chapter explores how landowners cultivated the appearance of wildness to enhance status and obscure ownership. It contrasts elite, middle-class, and labouring perspectives, revealing wilderness as a contested concept shaped by power, property, and access.

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Why is it important?

I show that 'wilderness' is not a neutral or timeless idea but one shaped by social and economic power. By linking landscape aesthetics to enclosure and dispossession, I offer a new way of understanding how environmental concepts are historically constructed and politically charged.