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Kevin MacDonnell, Louis Kirk McAuley. The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894, The Review of English Studies, Volume 76, Issue 323, February 2025, Pages 108–109, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgae081
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Extract
Today, the term ‘ecology’ is too often used as a catch-all to describe any and all things pertaining to nature and the environment. Obscured by this liberal usage is the term’s more specific reference to the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments. In The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894, Louis Kirk McAuley attends to this more precise meaning of ecology, centring its relational character when examining how British and American writers imagined, understood, and represented the interactions between humans, nonhumans, and their environments in imperial settings across the globe. What makes McAuley’s focus on the ‘human–extra-human relations’ confronted in empire writing so compelling is that it signals a decisive move towards a burgeoning version of ecocriticism that views nature relationally first and foremost. This framing aligns his project with the proliferation of work on capitalism as world ecology initiated by Jason Moore, a perspective that highlights the extent to which capitalism has further embedded humanity within the natural world. Indeed, Moore’s articulation of what he calls ‘capitalism in the web of life’ lies at the heart of The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, providing McAuley with his primary interlocutor as well as his governing critical apparatus. In fact, I would venture to say that it is through McAuley’s engagement with Moore that his monograph stages its most important scholarly intervention, framing the literature of empire as a sociocultural project that is fundamentally ecological.
