Sowing Empire

Planting and transplanting, seeding and reshaping¿landscaping practices that emerged in the eighteenth century¿are inextricable from the contested terrain of empire within which they operated. From the plantations of the ¿nabobs¿ to the island gardens of narrative fiction, from William Beckford¿s estate at Fonthill to Marie Antoinette¿s ornamented farm, Sowing Empire considers imperial relandscaping¿its patriarchal organization, heterosexual reproduction, and slavery¿and how it contributed to the construction of imperial power. At the same time, the book shows how these picturesque landscapes and sugar plantations contained within them the seeds of resistance¿how, for instance, slave gardens and the Afro-Caribbean practice of Vodou threatened authority and created new possibilities for once again transforming the landscape.In an ambitious work of wide-ranging literary, visual, and historical allusion, Jill H. Casid examines how landscaping functioned in an imperial mode that defined an