As a political-economic thinker, Giovanni Botero is mostly remembered for identifying the importance of industrial production to economic growth. This article expands our understanding of his political-economic thought by examining his ideas about wealth-producing effects of aquatic resources. In several publications from the late 1580s and 1590s, he discussed waterways as strategic technologies of commercial navigation and urged princes to improve their territories to create this affordance where it lacked naturally. I argue that orderly waterscapes, which facilitated access to sundry resources and occasioned all manner of economic activity, were for Botero among the most critical determinants of secular grandezza, or greatness.

This article compares Edmund Spenser’s “A View of the Present State of Ireland” (1596) and Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s “Milicia y descripción de las Indias” (1599) to show how writing colonial warfare informed the literary construction of human-natural relations in the early modern world. Each text imagines the transformation of ecological relationships between colonized peoples and their landscapes through military interventions that seek to interrupt Indigenous subsistence practices. These tracts exemplify the inseparability of colonialism, racialization, and the literary construction of nature in their visions of land and labor as perpetual sources of wealth for settlers and their sovereigns.

This article reconsiders Alfred Crosby’s Columbian exchange by turning from sweeping generalizations to the granular realities of New Spain. Drawing on the sixteenth-century relaciones geográficas, it argues that colonial environments were patchworks: mosaics of local ecologies, animal assemblages, and human choices. Cross-referencing the animals mentioned by local survey respondents with their environments illustrates how practitioners observed and sought to shape a new combination of American and European nature. The essay reframes ecological imperialism as contingent and uneven, foregrounding variation, resistance, and the dynamism of early modern nature and the actors who shaped it.