Romantic "Ghost Acres" and Environmental Modernity

Abstract:Pre-modern economies are typically constrained by the availability of land, which is required to produce food and other economic goods. In eighteenth-to nineteenth-century Britain, those environmental constraints on production were displaced by coal use and the importation of land-intensive resources such as potash and cotton. That land-saving import/extraction process underpinned the cultural coherence of the British "long eighteenth century" as an era of broadly continuous economic expansion. Anna Letitia Barbauld's poetry reflects ironically on that unprecedented era of sustained growth; on Britain's consequent national prestige and the modernization of its physical environments; and on the impending threat of decline.