Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Assistant Professor of British History
Ph.D. The University of Chicago 2005
M.Phil. The University of Cambridge 1997

FIELD SPECIALTIES

British history; the British Empire; the Enlightenment; science and environmental history; political economy.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson specializes in British history with a particular emphasis on the ties between enlightenment, empire and environment. He previously taught at Colorado State University. Currently, he is preparing for publication a book manuscript tentatively entitled Nature’s Commerce; The Scottish Highlands in the Age of Empire and Enlightenment 1750-1830. This research reinterprets the Scottish Enlightenment by showing how the Highland region functioned as a laboratory of sorts for practical experiments in sentimental population politics and ecological imperialism. The aim of the Highland improvers was to exploit the resources of the region while preserving the Gaelic population as a bulwark of the landed interest. Arguably, such a strategy set an enduring precedent for the neo-feudal and agrarian schemes of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Nature’s Commerce also reinterprets the development of classical political economy by relating it to the natural history of internal colonization. For the Highland improvers, a proper account of natural limits and prospects lay at the heart of economic reasoning. Their intense concern with questions of biological invasion, species conservation, soil fertility, and climate change rested on a view of the natural order on the periphery as inherently unstable, promising providential riches yet threatened with decline and degradation. This alternative vision of the natural basis of commerce helps to shed new light on the environmental presuppositions as well as the rhetorical omissions of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations where the stability of natural systems served to guarantee the self-regulating character of market exchange.

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PUBLICATIONS

“Wasteland Mania: the Alternative Modernity of Peat Moss,” in The World Turned Inside Out: Waste in History and Culture, ed. John F.M. Clark and John Scanlan (Cambridge Scholars’ Press, forthcoming)

 “The Physiology of Hypochondria in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Cultures of the Abdomen; Dietetics, Obesity, and Digestion in the Modern World, ed. Christopher Forth and Ana Cardin-Coyne (New York: Palgrave, 2005)

“Enlightened Hands: Managing Dexterity in British Medicine and Manufactures 1760-1800,” in Body Parts; Critical Explorations in Corporeality, ed. Christopher Forth and Ivan Crozier (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005)

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