Thanks to the metrological hegemony of the metric system, decimalization is now synonymous with quantitative precision, efficient calculation, and objective understandability. But a historicization of decimalization with respect to measurements reminds us that such objectivity cannot be taken for granted. Using decimal fractions explicitly required that people set aside traditional measurements for money, land, commodities, and time. Two centuries before the development of the metric system, the application of decimalization explicitly encouraged anticustomary approaches to measurement. Drawing interdisciplinarily on mathematical history, metrological history, and quantitative epistemology, with Stuart England as a case study, this article shows that quantitatively minded people rapidly adopted decimal fractions for measurements because they had explicitly advantageous exactness and ease of calculation.

Averages became a distinctive form of information in early modern European culture, first in commercial arithmetic, then in natural philosophy, demography, political economy, and eventually in eclectic social analysis. Averaging, in the modern sense of calculating an arithmetic mean by adding up the individual values of cases in a set and then dividing that total by the number of cases, provided an empirical and heuristic resource for understanding planetary orbits, fertility and mortality rates, experimental results in natural philosophy, fiscal resources, the return on stock market investments, the relative profitability of crops, incomes and the cost of living, and even the trivia of daily life. Averaging created a new class of fact—precisely typifying information that varied. By the Enlightenment, averages had become a respectable, readily deployed, form of fact, giving unity to the variety of experience and knowledge. Averages became a metaphor of credibility and normality.

Despite the stark alternatives of its title, No Wood, No Kingdom presents an extraordinarily varied political ecology of the nascent English/British Atlantic, composed of Great Britain, Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados.To an extent that defies synthesis, conflicts over wood arose in every context, so "political ecology-ideas and practices governing the definition and use of natural resources" (p.4)-was more political than ecological.What was "wood"?It could be types of spaces such as royal forests, parklands, hunting grounds, and insurgents' refuges.It could be a raw material for commercial and industrial purposes: bark, pipe/barrel staves, charcoal, naval stores of ships' timbers and tar, and mulberry leaves for silkworms.It could define rural landscapes: windbreaks, boundary trees, and hedges.It could be a commodity: cedar, mahogany, and dyewoods.It provided domestic subsistence: household fuel, coppice, thatch, lumber, fruit, and common rights to windfalls.In England royal forests predominated.Surveyors were supposed to protect hunting grounds and enhance the forests' beauty.But they were also supposed to produce income for the Crown, which often called for "disafforestation" (alienating royal forests), while, contradictorily, they had to maintain the forests' sustainability and allow for common rights to gather household supplies.In the country at large woods were threatened by enclosure, industrial depletion, and erosion.England's woods could sustainably grow about one cubic meter per person per year, one of the lowest ratios in northern Europe.Wood's scarcity was taken for granted.Ireland had no royal forests, but it had lots of woods.The main theme was deforestation: to deprive unruly Irish "woodkerns" (p.62) of their synonymous refuges, and to promote English plantations.Individual planters enjoyed practically unregulated use of their woodlands, which were primarily considered as wasteland; state purposes such as royal revenues and naval stores had no priority.Deforestation provided one-time profits from naval timbers, pipe staves, and charcoal.Thereafter, land's enduring value lay in agriculture, for which deforestation was a precondition, with minor exceptions for hunting and pasturage.Virginia's promotors initially promised that its abundant woods would alleviate English scarcity.But timber from Virginia raised weaker commercial expectations than dreams of mulberry trees and silkworms.Gigantic ironworks were another failed project, despite the availability of waterpower, bog iron,

Sarah Thomas. Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019. Pp. 304. $55.00 (cloth). - Volume 59 Issue 4

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This collection of essays shows how the American colonies' independence depended on an international crisis brought about by their rebellion. Seventeen historians from eight countries (museum curators, public historians, historians of science, historians of the Anglo-American colonial and revolutionary periods, and naval and military historians of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, India, and the United States) provide a multifaceted but coherent account of the American Revolution's international geopolitics. Drawing on the collections and expertise of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, it uses visual evidence to enrich, not just illustrate, its analysis. Naval power was crucial to the conduct and outcome of the Revolutionary War. In the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), the United Kingdom headed an anti-French coalition in theaters on the European continent and extending to the Americas, India, and the Pacific. In the War of American Independence, Britain had no allies, and, with the exceptions of the Gibraltar and Minorcan campaigns, fought overseas. Most of its previous allies and enemies formed the League of Armed Neutrality to trade with France, while Britain's outright enemies each fought for separate strategic reasons that “had little or nothing to do with aiding American independence” (p. 6). Spain, for example, was an ally of France, but not of the United States.

"Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England." Canadian Journal of History, 54(1-2), pp. 183–184

Throughout the Atlantic world, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, technology trumped humanity in visual representations of sugar plantations and their enslaved workforces. European artists presented the production of sugar as technologically progressive, while minimizing its crucial conjunction with slave labor. The sugarmill, with its vertical three-roller mills and trains of evaporative vats, became a synecdoche of the most intensive and expansive industry in the early modern world. Yet a major historiographic debate—whether the dependence on slave labor made the production of sugar economically regressive—has simply ignored the abundant visual evidence on the issue. As a humanitarian abolitionist movement mobilized in late-eighteenth-century Britain, its images emphasized the abuse of slaves individually but overlooked plantations, while artistic clients of anti-abolitionist patrons responded with picturesque landscapes showing slave plantations as tranquil manorial communities that happened to have intensive productive technology. And in defiance of abolitionism elsewhere, planters in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba visually advertised their global economic predominance with hypertechnological images of factories requiring only minuscule inputs of enslaved labor. The visual privileging of sugar’s technology manifested how easily Europeans could be distracted from concerns about the millions of enslaved people in their colonies.

Herman Moll's The World Described (1720), the pre-eminent folio atlas of Hanoverian Britain, departs from the usual Ortelian model in the selection and ordering of its contents. It placed Britain at the centre of the atlas so that the first half provided a cartographic description of Britain's overseas commercial interests, while the second half showed the kingdom's political interests on the Continent. The argument presented here is that Moll gave priority to global rather than imperial dimensions in helping his British readers appreciate the multifarious geography of their country's interests. La Description du monde d'Herman Moll (1720), un atlas in-folio de tout premier ordre de la Grande-Bretagne hanovrienne, se distingue du modele habituel inspire d'Ortelius par la selection de ses contenus et l'ordre de composition. Il place la Grande-Bretagne au centre de l'atlas de telle sorte que la premiere moitie de l'atlas offre une description cartographique des interets commerciaux de l'Angleterre outre-mer, tandis que la seconde moitie montre les interets politiques du royaume sur le continent. On soutient ici que Moll donna la priorite a une approche internationale plutot qu'imperiale en aidant ses lecteurs britanniques a apprecier les diverses facettes geographiques des interets de leur pays. In Herman Molls The World Described (1720), dem wichtigsten Folioatlas im Britannien zur Zeit der hannoveranischen Konige, bricht der Autor mit der ublichen, auf Ortelius zuruckgehenden Tradition der Auswahl und Anordnung des Inhalts. In diesem Atlas wird Britannien im Zentrum dargestellt; die davor angeordnete Halfte lasst britische uberseeische Handelsinteressen mittels Karten nachvollziehen, wahrend die zweite Halfte Britanniens politische Ambitionen in Europa behandelt. Moll gab den globalen Interessen gegenuber den imperialen den Vorzug und lehrte auf diese Weise seine britischen Leser, die vielfaltigen geographischen Interessen ihres Landes.La Descripcion del Mundo (1720) de Herman Moll, el preeminente atlas en formato folio de la Gran Bretana hannoveriana, parte del modelo usado por Ortelio en la seleccion y en el orden de sus contenidos. El mapa de Gran Bretana estaba colocado en el centro del atlas, de manera que la primera parte de dicho atlas proporcionaba una descripcion de interes comercial de la Gran Bretana ultramarina, mientras que la segunda mostraba los intereses politicos del reino en el continente. Aqui se argumenta que Moll dio prioridad a la dimension global mas que a la imperial, ayudando a sus lectores britanicos a apreciar los multiples intereses geograficos de su pais.

Picturing the Caribbean in the Global British Landscape JOHN E. CROWLEY Topographic representations of British realms increased markedly in the period from the Seven Years' War to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The topographic impulse in eighteenth-century British landscape art —to produce recognizable illustrations of scenes that had been viewed firsthand —sought to make a rapidly enlarging British world understandable to the political nation as a global landscape.1 In the diplomatic outcome of the Seven Years' War, Great Britain had gained a global empire over non-British peoples. An empire of conquest now ruled Canada, Bengal, and the TransAppalachian West of North America. This empire's administration depended on professional standing armies stationed in the interiors of North America and the Indian subcontinent, as well as on increased numbers of troops in Ireland and in the Caribbean slave colonies, not to mention those sent to put down the rebellion in the thirteen colonies that became the United States. Yet after 1763 ideals of trusteeship increasingly shaped metropolitan responsibilities toward newly colonized peoples, as jurists and policymakers determined their entitlement to the rights, privileges, and obligations of subjects, even though they had become subjects by force.2 Topographic landscape art made it possible for people throughout British realms to reassure themselves that they understood distant and/or previously unfamiliar lands of the British Empire. This British visual identification for 323 324 / CROWLEY previously alien places helped legitimize questionable imperial projects— in Canada the assimilation of a predominantly French and Catholic population, in the Trans-Appalachian West the maintenance of peace between First Nations and European settlers, in India the regulation of an empirewithin -an-empire-within-an-empire as the East India Company expanded territorially into Mughal realms, and, in an ironic response to the American Revolution, the forcible settling of free-born Britons in unimaginably distant New South Wales.3 Nowhere was such imperial legitimatization more needed than in the Caribbean. Caribbean colonies were synonymous with slavery, and in the second half of the eighteenth century slavery ceased to be the "problem" it had been in Western culture for over two millennia—unjust, but ineluctable. Enlightenment moral philosophers had reached a virtual consensus that the wrongs of slavery should be conected. Anti-slavery impulses sparked the glimmerings of anti-imperialism, as economic, moral, and historical writers —most notably Adam Smith, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal—scrutinized the legitimacy and benefits of colonization. Beginning in the 1760s, evangelical Britons radically dissociated themselves from their fellow subjects' involvement with slavery; anti-slavery reformers challenged the institution's legal underpinnings; and imperial reformers skeptically questioned the mercantilist advantages of the slave trade. As Christopher Brown has shown, an "empire without slaves"— virtually a political oxymoron before then—began to be bruited by British pamphleteers in the early 1770s.4 Landscape art of the British Caribbean developed as colonies there became controversial objects of national moral and economic concern. Yet historical studies of the Caribbean's early visual landscapes are few in comparison with those of Australia, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. To be sure, there are excellent studies of individual artists' work in the Caribbean: Beth Tobin's forceful interpretation of Agostino Brunias's genre representations of African-Caribbean people in St. Vincent and Dominica, David Morris's rich account of Thomas Hearne's early career in Antigua, and Dian Kriz's brilliant interpretation of the imperial implications of illustrations in Hans Sloane's History of Jamaica. But even Marcus Wood's profound book on Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America deliberately ignores "the vast body of imagery which might be described as 'documentary', and which represented day-to-day conditions and life on plantations."5 Caribbeanists have no strong tradition of studying eighteenth-century representations of their region, in contrast to the many studies of elsewhere Picturing the Caribbean in the Global British Landscape / 325 in the eighteenth-century British Empire: Mildred Archer on India, Bernard Smith on the Pacific, Elizabeth John's comparison of early landscape representations of Australia and the United States, and Amy Meyers's, Edward Nygren's, and Bruce Robertson's essays on the...