Landscapes of Elision: Nostalgia and Imperial Networks

Abstract

A striking aspect of Aukland-Peck’s piece is the way it traces a connection between naturalism and environmental exploitation via imperial networks. By grounding the discussion of Shell’s advertising campaign in a discussion of its historical emergence as a company trading in exotic seashells from across the British empire linked to existing domestic interest in seashells and fossils by naturalists, Aukland-Peck establishes naturalism itself as part of the lineage of Shell’s exploitation of imperial networks for later intensified forms of environmental extraction. There is no overstated claim here however: the move from seashells to oil and kerosene is clearly an economic one, with a kind of nostalgia for the oceanic constituting a thread of continuity with Shell’s seashell-trading origins, most obviously in the company name and logo. However, the connection between British domestic interest in the natural landscape through collecting and landscape painting and the growth of a commercial network which ravaged both imperial and domestic environments is striking, not least because of the poetic connection Auckland-Peck makes between the seashell as an exotic product for trade in the first instance, and as part of the substrate from which oil is extracted in the second. While imperial collecting was always extractive, this linkage between a set of practices at least seemingly oriented around an interest in “nature” and the groundwork it laid for later intensive environmental exploitation is an intriguing avenue of inquiry.