Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street, Mailbox 92
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-0638 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: fjonsson@uchicago.edu

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 empire, political economy, and the environment. He previously taught at Colorado State University.

My forthcoming book Nature's Commerce; the Environmental Context of the Scottish Enlightenment 1750-1820 reinterprets the Scottish Enlightenment by showing how the Highland region functioned as a laboratory for the historical and economic vision of Lowland savants like John Walker, Adam Smith, James Anderson, and Lord Kames. This upland vision of the Enlightenment sheds new light on the origins of classical political economy by exposing its environmental assumptions. Was the market sufficient to order nature, or did the complexity and fragility of the natural order require the intervention of experts in the service of the state? For Adam Smith and his successors in the classical liberal tradition, nature served as a handmaiden for exchange in a double sense. They looked to the natural world for a model of self-regulating balance that justified their own faith in market exchange. At the same time, they championed the market as the best means of managing the balance of nature. This liberal interpretation of nature was derived from a selective model of development based on the mixed husbandry of Lowland Scotland and East Anglia. Against this liberal view, a loose constellation of naturalists, forestry writers, and conservative landowners suggested that the natural order was too complex or fragile to be left unregulated, particularly on the peripheries of the nation and empire. Their economic strategy was to exploit the resources of the Highland region while preserving the Gaelic population as a military and social bulwark of the landed interest. Rather than assimilating the region directly to the Lowland model of industry and exchange, these conservative improvers favored a pattern of accommodation which was supposed to mix distinct historical stages - commerce and custom - into a harmonious hybrid. In this way, northern Scotland became an early battle ground for two rival ecologies of development. Arguably, this Enlightenment conflict over the fit between the economy and the environment set a crucial precedent for the history of colonial policy and post-colonial development. Indeed, it still resonates to some degree in the struggle of cornucopian libertarians and environmental economists over the proper economic response to the threat of global climate change.

My second project The Stationary Future: the End of Growth in the Age of Industry will focus on the history of the stationary state and the politics of nature in Britain between 1776 and 1851. It begins with the intellectual puzzle of why leading political economists worried about environmental limits to economic growth in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. A major aim here is to offer a broad political, intellectual, and environmental explanation for this pessimism, rooted in multiple historical patterns, including 1) the rise of prediction based on national statistics as a tool of governance 2) the use of natural history and particularly geology to define the temporal horizon and environmental assumptions of political economy 3) the frequency and visibility of environmental strains in the metropole, including debates over the coal, timber and food supplies 4) and the use of such strains to justify imperial expansion. A second major aim with this project is to provide a systematic account of the debt of modern environmental thought to classical political economy, particularly on the question of natural limits to growth and the place of prediction in projects of conservation.

Publications
Nature’s Commerce; the Environmental Context of the Scottish Enlightenment 1750-1820, forthcoming in the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth Century Studies for Yale University Press

“Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians”, American Historical Review, Volume 115, Number 5 (December 2010)

“Adam Smith in the Forest” in The Social Life of the Forest, ed. Kathleen Morrison and Susanna Hecht (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming)

“Environmental Mercantilism?” in Rethinking Mercantilism: New Perspectives on Early Modern Economic Thought, ed. Carl Wennerlind and Philip Stern, 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)

The Department of History

The University of Chicago

IN THIS SECTION

Faculty

Visiting Faculty

Emeriti Faculty

Associated Faculty

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

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