Inventing a Bountiful Earth: Settler Science in the Making of New Brunswick, 1763-1859

Abstract

Inventing a Bountiful Earth explores the ways in which the production of natural and/or scientific knowledge shaped the development of the British settler colony of New Brunswick. It examines the ways in which both the British Imperial government and, after 1786, the House of Assembly of New Brunswick employed science, both its practical application and as an idea, in state formation. Science was an important tool used in the service of empire: through exploration; processes of drawing, surveying, or collecting; and disseminating knowledge about a particular locale via a web of scientific networks circulating across Britain’s expanding empire. Doing so gave Britain an invented dominion over vast swaths of land, including New Brunswick, and projected a form of sovereignty that reinforced the empire’s claim and access to resources across the globe that settler colonies later reproduced.