An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic by Kate Luce Mulry

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic by Kate Luce Mulry Matthew Mulcahy An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic. By Kate Luce Mulry. Early American Places. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 372 pages. Cloth, ebook. Kate Luce Mulry’s ambitious and expansive An Empire Transformed suggests that when Charles II regained the thrones of England and Scotland in 1660, he was confronted by a disparate and disorderly empire. In response, she argues, Charles and his advisers embarked on a series of projects designed to transform individual bodies and larger physical landscapes throughout his dominion. Their goal was to bolster the restored monarch’s authority, tighten order and control across imperial spaces, and increase England’s wealth and prosperity. In some cases, these measures took the form of the implementation of deliberately constructed plans, such as efforts to develop royal gardens in Jamaica and London in the 1670s. In others, officials took advantage of moments of crisis such as the Great Fire of London to advance larger goals. Not all these efforts were successful, and some never moved beyond the planning stage. Nevertheless, Mulry argues that such plans reveal what Charles and his advisers hoped to achieve and, as result, offer “insights into how Restoration officials envisioned and enacted authority within a rapidly changing English empire” (23). Even if many plans never came to fruition, their “visions rippled out into the Atlantic world” and “had critical implications for the lived experiences of numerous residents within the empire” (21). Throughout, Mulry builds on Owen Stanwood’s argument that any attempt to the narrate the rise of the seventeenth-century English “empire must necessarily be both intensely local and transatlantic in scope” (20).1 One of the book’s many merits is its attention to how individual improvement schemes for England, Ireland, and the colonies fit into larger visions for governance. It is truly an Atlantic-wide history. The book’s five chapters provide a series of case studies of imperial improvements. The first concerns visions of urban planning generated in response to plague and fire in London during the mid-1660s. Contemporaries viewed the twin disasters at least in part as originating in and reflective of the city’s chaotic conditions. In their wake, both city and crown officials moved to mitigate the dangers of disease and fire by cleaning, paving, and widening streets, restricting what foods were eaten and what materials were used in rebuilding, and limiting the movement of [End Page 167] some individuals (those sick or perceived to be sick) in city spaces. By altering the physical environment—including the air that people breathed and the spaces in which they lived and worked—officials hoped a better, more orderly city and urban population would emerge. The reforms thus aimed to “extend greater control over the human and built landscapes of the city” (73), limit the loss of lives and property, and strengthen the realm. Although the most ambitious plans for remaking London did not materialize, Mulry posits that the desire for greater order and regularity influenced plans that were realized in the urban centers of South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Jamaica. At least, in Jamaica, however, such plans also reflected not only metropolitan influences but lived experience with other disasters—namely the great earthquake of 1692, which revealed the importance of open spaces where urban residents could flee from flames or falling buildings. The next two chapters concern efforts to drain wetlands in various parts of the empire. The first focuses on England and Ireland. Reformers viewed the fenlands in eastern England as home to riotous and unruly subjects who defied authority and reveled in what the reformers viewed as a primitive economic existence. Planners believed that draining the fens would open new land for agricultural development and alter the behavior (for the better) of those living in the wild lands. Mulry also highlights how some contemporaries connected drainage efforts at home to colonization plans abroad, as they insisted that if England developed more of its domestic agricultural potential there would be less motivation for individuals to move to colonies, thereby limiting the loss...