Architecture and design; housing and town planning; mechanization and the everydayness of machines; rationalization and scientific management; cars and romance of the road; scientific mastery of the natural world and the non-European globe; the physics revolution and natural science – these were the material frontiers of forward-facing progressivist expectancy between the wars. The excitements of innovation reached from the blueprints of Le Corbusier and the design departures of Bauhaus to Schütte-Lihotzky’s modular kitchens and Lubetkin’s modestly scaled public commissions. From photography, cinema, and X-rays, through electricity, mechanical tools, and small appliances, to automobiles and aeroplanes, machines harnessed enthusiasm and energized the imagination. Whether through new technologies, applied science, or theoretical chemistry and physics, laboratory science was universally mobilized for governance, especially in medicine and public health, industrial organization, agrarian research, and armaments. The epistemological foundations, theoretical directions, and experimental organization of laboratory science opened new vistas of policy-driven governmentality.

This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

Conventional wisdom among philosophers has long held that Aristotelian teleological essentialism is incompatible with Darwinian evolutionary biology. I argue that the appearance of incompatibility here is ill-founded. For a start, Darwinism has no need of the extrinsicist, relational, conception of species sponsored by cladism. Indeed, it requires what Devitt calls intrinsic biological essentialism. The latter, for its part, has no need of eternal, unchanging, species, notwithstanding Aristotle’s own view. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with the claim that species evolve from one another and go extinct. (Those who deny this conflate species with species essences.) As to natural teleology, many philosophers assume that nature cannot contain final ends or goods – but this consensus is open to challenge. As functional biology demonstrates, biologists have never extruded final causation from nature at the local level; indeed, they rely on it, pervasively, in their explanations and descriptions of natural processes. This points, once again, to the compatibility between Aristotelian teleological essentialism and evolutionary biology, and to their deep mutual relevance.

Ethics, for Emerson, begins in perceiving the “wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world” such that ethics, in thinking and in living, is a matter of being “allied to all.” In this view, the “infinitude of the private man” – often yoked to the concept of “self-reliance” – names a metaphysical and ontological fact at the heart of Emerson’s ethics: human existence within a web of interconnections. This chapter draws widely from Emerson’s oeuvre to show how he unites “severe science with a poetic vision,” seeing and seeking to express how “Our life is consentaneous and far-related.” His work teaches us to see kinships between ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, and politics, and to consider ethics a practice of observing the intimacies in which we exist and in which the ethical question “How shall I live?” begins living in us.

I conclude by briefly addressing the relations of science and culture and the persistence of symbolism in contemporary scientific discourse, and I deploy the case study of the cormorant to discuss the value of longue durée cultural history for contemporary scientific analysis of the contextual aspects of human-animal conflicts.

This chapter highlights the parameters of modernity, because democracy today cannot rest on earlier practices created for small cities, like Athens, in the ancient world. Therefore, in 1917 and 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber described two new vocations, of “Science” and “Politics,” as characteristic of societies that grew out of the Enlightenment. “Scientists” used instruments and experiments to discover “knowledge” more reliable than “opinion.” The result is that their work overthrew many traditional beliefs and led to “disenchantment.” “Politicians” arose because, when “subjects” became “citizens” in many Western states, they needed leaders and spokespeople who would help them to organize their sentiments and express their preferences. In which case, politicians, elected on behalf of voluntary support from below, ruled on the basis of “tradition,” “legality,” or “charisma.” Weber’s terms overlooked at least two large problems. Charismatic politicians could break the “iron cage” of “bureaucracy,” but, as “demagogues,” they could also lead voters in undesirable directions. Voters, perhaps advised by scholars, would have to resist being led astray, but Weber said nothing about how they, in effect, should exercise a third new “vocation” in modern societies. Citizens were not present before the Enlightenment; they are everywhere now. What are they supposed to do? Weber did not say.

This chapter explains how white supremacy evolved and adapted after the US Civil War and the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. Rather than weakening, white power structures found new ways to maintain racial hierarchies through scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics. These scientific frameworks provided intellectual justification for continued oppression while appearing objective and dispassionate. The period saw the rise of immigration restrictions, voter suppression, and systematic segregation across English-speaking societies, all designed to preserve white political and economic power. New “race perils” reflected white anxieties about demographic change, while eugenics aimed to protect racial “purity” through sterilization programs and anti-miscegenation laws. Particularly significant was the denial of capital accumulation to nonwhites through housing discrimination, job discrimination, and business restrictions. Although many voices challenged these racist theories and practices as false and cynical, they were consistently overpowered by institutional forces desperate to maintain white supremacy.

This chapter investigates the role of science and technology as a function of the history of the World War II effort to transform national security resource and acquisition under Vannevar Bush at MIT, its effects upon American society as President Eisenhower warned the nation in 1961, and the later forces of globalization, the knowledge economy and accelerating emerging and disruptive science and technology as applied to war and terror today. Important is our understanding of our application of a specific logic to war and terror after 9/11; forward deployment of American military power overseas and homeland security (defense of the homeland) for the purpose of understanding the rapid evolution of technological capability in achieving outcomes. Furthermore, we will look more specifically at emerging science and technology as a particular area of technological innovation that stems from research and development phenomena that is tasked to provide outsize national security, specifically counterterrorism deliverables for the United States.

Enlightenment thought contributed to developing and reinforcing white supremacy in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. While often celebrated as promoting universal liberty, Enlightenment scholarship was deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery, with many prominent thinkers either benefiting from or actively justifying human trafficking and racial hierarchies. Figures like Hans Sloane and John Locke developed new systems of human classification that departed from earlier Greek environmental theories, instead positing fixed racial categories with Europeans at the top. This early scientific racism provided justification for colonial exploitation while being funded by slavery-derived wealth. Additionally, emerging concepts of liberty and rights were explicitly limited to white men, with writers contrasting “freeborn” Englishmen to supposedly inferior races. These ideas culminated in new forms of race-based or “nation” states, exemplified by the USA, which formally enshrined white supremacy in law. While some contemporary voices criticized these developments, the profitable alliance between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and slavery proved difficult to stop.

British imperial expansion reinforced expanded white supremacy from the late 1700s through the mid 1800s. Rather than weakening after the loss of American colonies, British concepts of racial superiority intensified through colonial encounters in India, Australia, and beyond. In India, British East India Company rule shifted from early trade partnerships to domination justified by claims of innate European superiority. In Australia, colonizers treated indigenous peoples as obstacles to be removed, implementing policies of displacement and ethnic cleansing in Tasmania. Meanwhile, emerging scientific disciplines like craniology provided justification for racial hierarchies, with researchers across Europe collaborating to measure and categorize human differences. Though the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) in the British Empire marked significant humanitarian victories, these reforms did not challenge underlying assumptions of white supremacy. This period established enduring patterns of imperial rule based on presumed racial difference, whether through direct violence or supposedly benevolent administration.

This chapter discusses the Renaissance sensibility for order, symmetry and the elevation of the individual as an originating cause. Through Ruskin, then Heidegger, comes a discussion of how humans relate to things as equipment, as tools, how these relational and regional settings are those to which all craft work adheres, and how, nevertheless, we can be unhomed from such. There is a focus on the work of the potter Gillian Lowndes as an exemplar of this unhoming.

de Waal considers both Christian fundamentalism and pragmatism as competing responses to what Nietzsche called “the death of God”: the demise of the concept of God that was central to both science and philosophy in the modern era. de Waal provides an account of the relation among religion, science, and philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century that culminates in the demise of the idea of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator and in science inheriting the social prestige that was once religion’s. The fundamentalists responded by maintaining that the only good science is that which is consistent with Scripture – unlike, e.g., the theory of evolution. Pragmatists responded by embracing the new science and responded to it with a passel of new philosophical ideas, e.g., Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, conceived as a test of meaningfulness for our concepts; his critical common-sensism, which allows us to take a critical position with regard to our common-sense beliefs; James’s denial of a ready-made world and his doctrine that it is sometimes permissible to believe in the absence of evidence; and fallibilism, which denies the possibility of certainty.

By the end of the nineteenth century, British-ruled India faced an ecological crisis due to the extension of cultivation, deforestation and desiccation. Famines since the 1870s had led to a decline in population in some regions. While colonial authorities attributed the famines to climatic factors, others held taxation, institutional reforms and economic policies responsible for these disasters. Colonial science emerged as a significant tool in managing and monitoring environments at the same time. The chapter examines the interlinked economic and ecological history of India in these times and the responses by the British imperial authorities and scientists to the perceived crisis.