Sowing Empire

More about the book

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 and remade the "heartlands" of nations as well as the contact zones and colonial peripheries in the West and East Indies. Revealing the colonial landscape as far more than an agricultural system - as a means of regulating national, sexual, and gender identities - Casid also traces how the circulation of plants and hybridity influenced agriculture and landscaping on European soil and how colonial contacts materially shaped what we take as "European."