Picturing landscape in an age of extraction: Europe and its colonial networks, 1780-1850
University of Chicago Press, September 2025
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European artists confronted the emergence of a new, essentially extractive way of thinking about and treating the natural world. It was characterized by large-scale, self-accelerating efforts to quantify, optimize, separate, circulate, and monetize the physical environment across global networks. This book centers the practices and the logic of extraction in a new account of what was at stake in visual representations of the natural world during the first several decades of Europe’s industrial revolution. Across the chapters, the book explores how both artworks and technical diagrams portrayed the natural world in ways that made it assimilable to the protocols of extraction. Equally, the book queries which pictorial formats thwarted such protocols. It focuses on developments that were taking place primarily within Britain, France, and Germany but that were always embedded within Europe’s colonial networks, particularly in North Africa, Oceania, India, and the Americas.
review excerpts
"An exemplary book...[it] presents a capstone vision of how histories of art and science can be told together." Matthew Hunter (McGill)
"O’Rourke debuts as equal parts erudite scholar and exceptional storyteller, which is an all-too-rare gift in academic prose." Nina Amstutz (University of Oregon)
"As her wide reading and close looking show, these artists' attempts to make the body legible hit at every juncture upon instability of the self, invisibility of the causes of action, and other sources of error and indeterminacy in scientific method and Enlightenment efforts to apply it to modern life." (Andrei Pop, University of Chicago)
*Winner, The BARS First Book Prize 2023*
*Short-listed, Kenshur Prize for best book in eighteenth-century studies, 2023*
Table of contents
Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge
1. De Loutherbourg's Mesmeric Effects
2. Fuseli's Physiognomic Impressions
3. Girodet's Electric Shocks
4. Self-Evidence on the Scaffold
Cambridge University Press
2021
FORMAT: Hardback
ISBN: 9781316519028
Paperback edition: October 2023
