Ecology and empire in Andrew Burnaby's Travels through the Middle Settlements of North America (1775)

Abstract

This essay draws attention to Andrew Burnaby's Travels through the Middle Settlements of North America (1775) for its imperially motivated yet also often ecocritically inclined documentation of colonial ecologies. No existing interpretations of the text have explicitly studied the traveller's imperial impulses in relation to his ecological consciousness. Readers have primarily focused on Travels as a colonial-era document of human-centred life. I argue that Burnaby's travelogue deserves to be recognised for its nuanced documentation of the non-human realm in relation to anthropocentrism. The author's self-positioning magnifies the notion that the formation of imperial identity can accommodate fragments of ecologically interested selfhood. The narrative stages the interconnectivity between political and ecological arguments, dramatising what critics have theorised as the “inextricability of environmental history and empire building” [DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley. 2011. “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, and George B. Handley, 3–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10]. Burnaby's thoughts alternate between ecocentric and anthropocentric perspectives, yielding a fertile interpretive ground for both postcolonial and ecocritical inquiry.