Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
My first book, Enlightenment’s Frontier, investigates the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith’s famous defense of free trade? This perspective recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.
My second book, Green Victorians: the Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District (University of Chicago Press, 2016), co-authored with Vicky Albritton, considers the problem of the Anthropocene from the perspective of a late Victorian utopian movement. Green Victorians tells the story of the first “post-carbon” society in Britain, a community in the English Lake District dedicated to Arts and Crafts industry and simple living. This experiment was galvanized by precocious anxieties about anthropogenic climate change, voiced by the eccentric polymath John Ruskin. He convinced his supporters to reject coal and steam in favor of renewable energy and labor-intensive handicraft production. By creating a new culture of sufficiency, Ruskin and his followers sought to demonstrate that a simple material life was still compatible with a great measure of cultural creativity and intellectual freedom. Green Victorians explores the radical and material experience of Ruskin’s community without shying away from the darker side of the movement, including its technophobia and paternalism.
My current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy. The British Industrial Revolution saw the birth of the first fossil fuel economy. At the same time, geologists transformed the public understanding of the earth's interior and deep past. My new project sets out to show that these developments—fossil growth and fossil science—converged to produce a fundamental reorientation of politics and culture towards cheap energy and cornucopian growth.
My research has been funded by fellowships from the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
In October 2020, I will join John Boyer and Jan Goldstein as editor of the Journal of Modern History. We welcome article submissions on all topics in European history after 1500. For inquiries, please contact [email protected]
My second book, Green Victorians: the Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District (University of Chicago Press, 2016), co-authored with Vicky Albritton, considers the problem of the Anthropocene from the perspective of a late Victorian utopian movement. Green Victorians tells the story of the first “post-carbon” society in Britain, a community in the English Lake District dedicated to Arts and Crafts industry and simple living. This experiment was galvanized by precocious anxieties about anthropogenic climate change, voiced by the eccentric polymath John Ruskin. He convinced his supporters to reject coal and steam in favor of renewable energy and labor-intensive handicraft production. By creating a new culture of sufficiency, Ruskin and his followers sought to demonstrate that a simple material life was still compatible with a great measure of cultural creativity and intellectual freedom. Green Victorians explores the radical and material experience of Ruskin’s community without shying away from the darker side of the movement, including its technophobia and paternalism.
My current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy. The British Industrial Revolution saw the birth of the first fossil fuel economy. At the same time, geologists transformed the public understanding of the earth's interior and deep past. My new project sets out to show that these developments—fossil growth and fossil science—converged to produce a fundamental reorientation of politics and culture towards cheap energy and cornucopian growth.
My research has been funded by fellowships from the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
In October 2020, I will join John Boyer and Jan Goldstein as editor of the Journal of Modern History. We welcome article submissions on all topics in European history after 1500. For inquiries, please contact [email protected]
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Books by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
By bringing together scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, this volume provides an innovative multi-disciplinary perspective that corrects previous scholarship which has discussed scientific and cultural issues separately. In doing so, it recognizes that this challenge is complex and cannot be addressed by a single discipline, but requires a concerted effort to think about its political and social, as well as technical and economic dimensions. This volume is essential for all students and scholars of environmental and economic history.
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.
Christopher Otter, Ohio State University
"This highly original, absorbing, and beautifully written work rethinks Ruskin by anchoring his thought, and that of his friends and associates, in their daily routines, showing how a style of thought we might call “ecological” emerged through prosaic practices. But it also shows the difficulties inherent in creating such a style of thought, and the complexities and compromises that emerged alongside ecological thinking. The issues raised in this book, vital today, will become only more significant in the future."
Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth
"Green Victorians provides a welcome exploration of an important but overlooked aspect of British environmental history. A valuable addition to the recent upsurge of interest in Ruskin's sociocultural work and legacies, it also brilliantly revises the history of environmentalism, making a powerful case for tracing the roots of modern ideas on sustainability, low growth, and artisanship to John Ruskin and his lakeland disciples. This is a Victorian book for the Anthropocene."
Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
"Green Victorians traces the critique of consumer society and the fossil fuel economy to John Ruskin’s circle in England’s Lake District. There among the hills, the erratic, brilliant art historian and an idiosyncratic band of visionaries including London barrister Albert Fleming, the charismatic Coniston gardener Susanna Beever, and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley tried to revive handicraft production and simpler modes of life divorced from consumerism. This bracing story, eloquently told, traces the allure of the ‘culture of sufficiency’ and its downfall. A joy to read as well as an edgy political challenge, Green Victorians looks at the past with an eye to our future."
Mark Fiege, Colorado State University
“Here is a remarkable and prescient recovery of a forgotten moment when a group of people tried to reenvision what it means to be modern. Their struggles to achieve what the authors call a ‘culture of sufficiency’ remind us of the enduring need for all people to live fulfilling lives without laying waste to the planet. Thoughtful, beautifully written, and profoundly unsettling, this is a model history suited to the new epoch in which we find ourselves.”
Papers by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
and geological framework. The chapter concludes by considering the ways in which Anthropocene science is producing rival ideological interpretations, including competing concepts of transcendental ingenuity and envelopes of stability. Such a process of appropriation suggests that the Anthropocene framework might become a new battlefield for the long-standing conflict between cornucopian and Malthusian interpretations of the environment.
being depleted, and the planet is continuing to warm. The immediate future is, he implies, basically rather terrifying.
This transition into the Anthropocene is unquestionably the deepest and most profound event in recent history. While the term is only a couple of decades old, it has become hard to imagine conceptualizing the impact of human beings on the earth — the collision of human history and planetary geology — without it. But how should scholars working on British culture and history respond to the conceptual challenges
of the Anthropocene? How are we supposed to combine two scales of analysis — the geological and the historical? To get our bearings, we assembled ourselves as a roundtable of scholars with significant interest in these debates. Chris Otter, the moderator, is associate professor of British history at Ohio State University. Alison Bashford is research professor of history, University of New South Wales. John Brooke is humanities distinguished professor at Ohio State University. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is associate professor of British history and the history of science at the University of Chicago. Jason M. Kelly is director of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute and associate professor of British history at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
The following exchange was the result of ongoing informal conversations among the contributors, who are all, in different ways, interested in the emergent concept of the Anthropocene and the challenges it posed, and the opportunities it provided, for historians working on Britain and the world. The conversation began at the end of 2015 and continued for about a year.
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, "Scottish Tobacco and Rhubarb: the Natural Order of Civil Cameralism in the Scottish Enlightenment," Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (2016) Pp. 129–47.
Bourgeois reason takes many forms. In Adam Smith’s economic vision, the natural world was fundamentally stable and benign. There was no room for sudden oscillations of climate. Famine was the product of political meddling with markets, not a failure of natural supply. Indeed, the self-regulating properties of the free market were supposed to reflect the homeostatic balance of the natural order. Here political economists were indebted to 18th-century natural history and the concept of an economy of nature. This conceit about a fundamental fit between the economy and the natural world has enjoyed a long afterlife in classical liberal thought. One way to think about the longevity of these Enlightenment ideas is to see them as ideological manifestations of Holocene stability. The small variability of temperature and carbon dioxide levels for more than 11,000 years has given rise to deep-seated habits and ideas about the harmony of the natural world. In the Holocene, it made quite a bit of sense to idealize the environment as a stable envelope for the economy. The commitment to indefinite economic growth espoused by the economics profession in the postwar era is perhaps its most triumphant expression. Ironically, the new 1945 start date for the Anthropocene implies that such Promethean optimism reached its peak just as the Holocene world came to an end.
By bringing together scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, this volume provides an innovative multi-disciplinary perspective that corrects previous scholarship which has discussed scientific and cultural issues separately. In doing so, it recognizes that this challenge is complex and cannot be addressed by a single discipline, but requires a concerted effort to think about its political and social, as well as technical and economic dimensions. This volume is essential for all students and scholars of environmental and economic history.
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.
Christopher Otter, Ohio State University
"This highly original, absorbing, and beautifully written work rethinks Ruskin by anchoring his thought, and that of his friends and associates, in their daily routines, showing how a style of thought we might call “ecological” emerged through prosaic practices. But it also shows the difficulties inherent in creating such a style of thought, and the complexities and compromises that emerged alongside ecological thinking. The issues raised in this book, vital today, will become only more significant in the future."
Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth
"Green Victorians provides a welcome exploration of an important but overlooked aspect of British environmental history. A valuable addition to the recent upsurge of interest in Ruskin's sociocultural work and legacies, it also brilliantly revises the history of environmentalism, making a powerful case for tracing the roots of modern ideas on sustainability, low growth, and artisanship to John Ruskin and his lakeland disciples. This is a Victorian book for the Anthropocene."
Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
"Green Victorians traces the critique of consumer society and the fossil fuel economy to John Ruskin’s circle in England’s Lake District. There among the hills, the erratic, brilliant art historian and an idiosyncratic band of visionaries including London barrister Albert Fleming, the charismatic Coniston gardener Susanna Beever, and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley tried to revive handicraft production and simpler modes of life divorced from consumerism. This bracing story, eloquently told, traces the allure of the ‘culture of sufficiency’ and its downfall. A joy to read as well as an edgy political challenge, Green Victorians looks at the past with an eye to our future."
Mark Fiege, Colorado State University
“Here is a remarkable and prescient recovery of a forgotten moment when a group of people tried to reenvision what it means to be modern. Their struggles to achieve what the authors call a ‘culture of sufficiency’ remind us of the enduring need for all people to live fulfilling lives without laying waste to the planet. Thoughtful, beautifully written, and profoundly unsettling, this is a model history suited to the new epoch in which we find ourselves.”
and geological framework. The chapter concludes by considering the ways in which Anthropocene science is producing rival ideological interpretations, including competing concepts of transcendental ingenuity and envelopes of stability. Such a process of appropriation suggests that the Anthropocene framework might become a new battlefield for the long-standing conflict between cornucopian and Malthusian interpretations of the environment.
being depleted, and the planet is continuing to warm. The immediate future is, he implies, basically rather terrifying.
This transition into the Anthropocene is unquestionably the deepest and most profound event in recent history. While the term is only a couple of decades old, it has become hard to imagine conceptualizing the impact of human beings on the earth — the collision of human history and planetary geology — without it. But how should scholars working on British culture and history respond to the conceptual challenges
of the Anthropocene? How are we supposed to combine two scales of analysis — the geological and the historical? To get our bearings, we assembled ourselves as a roundtable of scholars with significant interest in these debates. Chris Otter, the moderator, is associate professor of British history at Ohio State University. Alison Bashford is research professor of history, University of New South Wales. John Brooke is humanities distinguished professor at Ohio State University. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is associate professor of British history and the history of science at the University of Chicago. Jason M. Kelly is director of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute and associate professor of British history at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
The following exchange was the result of ongoing informal conversations among the contributors, who are all, in different ways, interested in the emergent concept of the Anthropocene and the challenges it posed, and the opportunities it provided, for historians working on Britain and the world. The conversation began at the end of 2015 and continued for about a year.
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, "Scottish Tobacco and Rhubarb: the Natural Order of Civil Cameralism in the Scottish Enlightenment," Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (2016) Pp. 129–47.
Bourgeois reason takes many forms. In Adam Smith’s economic vision, the natural world was fundamentally stable and benign. There was no room for sudden oscillations of climate. Famine was the product of political meddling with markets, not a failure of natural supply. Indeed, the self-regulating properties of the free market were supposed to reflect the homeostatic balance of the natural order. Here political economists were indebted to 18th-century natural history and the concept of an economy of nature. This conceit about a fundamental fit between the economy and the natural world has enjoyed a long afterlife in classical liberal thought. One way to think about the longevity of these Enlightenment ideas is to see them as ideological manifestations of Holocene stability. The small variability of temperature and carbon dioxide levels for more than 11,000 years has given rise to deep-seated habits and ideas about the harmony of the natural world. In the Holocene, it made quite a bit of sense to idealize the environment as a stable envelope for the economy. The commitment to indefinite economic growth espoused by the economics profession in the postwar era is perhaps its most triumphant expression. Ironically, the new 1945 start date for the Anthropocene implies that such Promethean optimism reached its peak just as the Holocene world came to an end.
undermining the “message of universal brotherly love found in the New
Testament” (271). Yet in the course of his research, Kidd has to admit that the attractive simplicity of this hypothesis did not stand up to the pressure of the evidence. Rather than a quasi-Hegelian schema then, The Forging of Races offers a history of “illogical developments” (271). Kidd’s analysis demonstrates how different strains of Protestant theology both obstructed and enabled racial thought. He takes very seriously
the antiracist implications of the Christian doctrine of monogenesis, that is, the insistence on the essential equality and community of mankind derived from the belief in the divine creation of mankind from a single origin. But he also notes that the ambiguities of biblical exegesis generated contradictory interpretations, which in turn served as a crucible for racial thought. He suggests that lingering questions about the narrative of Genesis raised the possibility of multiple acts of creation—in short, the polygenesis of different races. These two opposing tendencies provide The Forging of Races with its fundamental drama and critical impetus.
DRAFT paper for Workshop on “Rethinking Economic History in the Anthropocene,” organized by Prasannan Parthasarathi and Julia Adeney Thomas, Boston College, March 23-25, 2017.
This course takes the format of a junior research colloquium, which means that we will spend a lot of time reflecting on the wide range of methods available in historical research, including economic, environmental, political, and intellectual approaches. Over the course of the quarter, students will design and undertake an original research project of fifteen to twenty pages. Although the course covers themes in economic history, it does not assume prior knowledge of economics or advanced mathematics.
HIST 43203/ENG 43204
The new science of the Anthropocene imagines the human species as a geological agent, capable of altering the life supporting system of the planet through anthropogenic climate change and other environmental processes triggered by exponential economic growth and intensive energy use. The aim of this course is to investigate the concept of the Anthropocene from the perspective of historical accounts of energy use. Our main priority will be to trace the development of the fossil fuel economy from its British origins to the present day. We will consider the social life of energy in its full sense, ranging over questions of ecology, history, technology, political economy, literature, and ethics.
A Special Workshop at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, 2015-16
Faculty sponsors: Emily Osborn, Benjamin Morgan and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Visiting speakers: Joshua Howe, Jason Kelly, Tobias Menely, Christophe Bonneuil, and Jason Moore
Graduate Assistant: Michael Dango
The problem of climate change forces us to rethink many of the basic analytical categories in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Within the humanities, writers and artists are experimenting with new ways in which their practices can catalyze environmental awareness, and emerging research is beginning to integrate the history of culture with the history of the earth’s climate.
This project will bring together faculty and graduate students from across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences in a reading group. We are especially interested in the place of the humanities in meeting the challenge of climate change. How might humanistic perspectives inform the science and politics of climate change? We will also consider how climate change is transforming our understanding of history, politics, literature, and ethics, inspiring new approaches within the humanities.