Book Review: ‘What nature suffers to groe’: life, labor and landscape on the Georgia coast, 1680-1920

Abstract

The impressive way in which North American historians, following such luminaries as Donald Worster and Bill Cronon, have started to engage with the land is shown in this book. It chronicles the way in which society and nature interacted in the coastal regions of Georgia over three centuries. That there was considerable change during this period need not be any surprise and between the initial colonization by Europeans and the end of this author’s narrative there were a number of significant re-appraisals and re-workings of the land and the near-shore environments. The way in which these are structured by the author is to separate out a number of distinctive types: the imperialist ambitions of the Georgia Trustees, the plantation culture of rice and cotton by large landowners and their slaves, the more fragmentary uses of lumbermen and truck farmers and promoters of the New South. Though not explicit in the narrative, this has much in common with the structure of sequent occupance developed by Jan Broek in his once-famous and now (I suspect) largely forgotten monograph on the Santa Clara valley. This Georgia narrative is developed in enormous detail and is supported by seventy-nine pages of Notes, plus a twenty-one page bibliography, all produced to a very high standard, though possibly a bit under-illustrated. That the story is of interest goes without saying, provided that you are interested in Georgia. This is not a huge flaw in the book but it does mean that if the region is not your speciality, then there are not many general lessons to be learned from it. One of the blurb writers suggests that Stewart has ‘deconstructed’ the landscape but in essence this is largely what has not happened. Stewart goes to some length at the outset to emplace the study within the canon of historical writing about humannature relations but in the end the product bears none of the detailed linkages to broader ideas that informs the work of, for example, Carolyn Merchant on New England, where each phase was tied to very specific ideological structures in the occupying society: here we have to make do with a more generalized treatment in the Epilogue. There is however the interesting statement that the human-land relations are in latter years much more fragmentary than previously and this is an enticing example of what seems to be a wider phenomenon, namely that the growth of the importance of the individual in western cultures ever since medieval times but accelerating in the nineteenth century has produced with it a spatial fragmentation of land ownership and land uses, including the sequestration of some parts of nature itself into ‘reserves’. As a counter-force, there is much coalescence and Stewart remarks near the end of the book that ‘little remains that is local’. So there are two audiences for this book: the ‘local’, who will be fascinated by the detail of what exactly happened when and to whom, and the wider group, for whom the general conclusions fit into a wider construction of the main types of relationship between the material and the ideational. But as an example of detailed scholarship on what produced for various times a sense of place, this book will have an honourable place on the shelves of historians and of 246 Book reviews