This lecture charts the emergence of new pictorial formats for representing landscape that derived from and accelerated industrial mineral extraction in Britain in the early 19^th century. These formats, in turn, actively assimilated colonial environments in North America and India into a system of extractive capitalism through which Britain consolidated both economic and territorial power. In an alternative account of 19th-century landscape, Professor O’Rourke queries how pictorial formats alternately enabled or disabled this process.

Hosted by the Jerrold Ziff Lecture in Modern Art series | Art History Program

This is the second talk in the 2-part Victorian Culture and Climate Change lecture series. The first event  is Nathan Hensley (English, Georgetown University) on September 23.