Cultivation and Control: Grape Growing as Expansion in Nineteenth-century United States and Australia

Abstract

This essay proposes that viticulture (growing grapes for wine) was an international set of colonial tactics for transforming landscapes and for propagating a worldview of cultivation and control in the nineteenth century. By virtue of propagating grapes, Americans and Australians sought to prove themselves and their landscapes as solidly located within the accepted Western narrative of world history which claimed that all powerful nations, since antiquity, had successful grape cultures. A study of the international mid-nineteenth century grape craze reveals similarities and crucial differences in colonial viticultural rhetoric and aesthetics. The Western capitalist dedication to growing wine in America and Australia reveals that the eighteenth-century 'ethic of exploration' had successfully transformed into a nineteenth-century ethic of cultivation.