Empire and Landscape in the long 18th century

The evolution of 'landscape' as a genre in the visual arts is usually attributed to developments in metropolitan English culture during the later 18th and early 19th centuries. Scholars have seldom considered the role of imperial landscapes in this process. This research workshop series seeks to document and analyse the ways some of the very different landscapes found within the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries came to be defined in relation to each other. The project sets itself two main tasks: first, to examine how the physical character, pictorial visualisation, and cultural perception of two particular imperial possessions- in the Caribbean and in British India (or as they were often known, the 'West and the East Indies') - were shaped, both positively and negatively, by the natural elements, artistic conventions and moral and ideological concepts associated with the domestic English landscape, Secondly, and perhaps mroe radically, the project will explore the extent to which a long-standing ideal of the English landscape that emerged in metropolitan culture in this period- one that found varied expression in scores of country estates, in thousands of exhibited paintings and in innumerable Victorian photographs- was both bound up with, and made distinctive from these non-domestic and exotic 'Indian' landscapes.

The workshop series will address the dynamic relationship between metropolitan and imperial landscapes through a series of four linked inter-disciplinary seminars. Scholars from a variety of disciplines will participate, exploring the extent to which the visual arts were being transformed by a range of scientific techniques and cultural practices associated with the experience of empire. Participants will be drawn from the history of art, geography, cartography, sociology, archaeology, English and history. The seminars will the novel form of applied expertise, with participants researching and commenting on different case-studies of landscape in imperial settings. The three main seminars will focus on: 1) Trans imperial estate management in England and the West Indies in the eighteenth century; 2) Painted and graphic representations of the English and Indian landscape c. 1780-1820; and 3) Photography and Victorian India. The fourth seminar is designed to be briefer in nature amd to allow participants to reflect upon, and develop, the points of contact established in the initial seminars, and to suggest ways in which this topic might be developed in future.