The Edgeworths, Ireland’s Bogs, and Improvement

One of the main contemporary debates in Ireland in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries was about the need for improvement, to both land and people. The stubborn Romantic image of ‘the emerald isle’ does little to challenge the perception that the Irish landscape went untouched in the pre-famine era. Through analysis of maps produced by the Bog Commission (1809-1814) and the first Ordnance Survey (c.1830s), a new picture emerges of an agriculturally intensive peatscape involving practices like drainage, cultivation, and the cutting of turf, which likely led to the release of large amounts of greenhouse gases. However, as this paper will explore, historical carbon emissions from Ireland’s bogs cannot be so easily connected to either agricultural capital or discourses of improvement; factors that have featured prominently in arguments relating to England’s industrial north-west. Rather, the vast social and ecological changes that took place on Ireland’s bogs, which preoccupied and perplexed political economists across Europe, reveal a complex model of carbon intensification driven largely by poverty and a narrowed economy. Many of these changes and frustrations with the state of the bogs are recorded in the Edgeworth archive, which I discuss in this paper. Ultimately, this talk will argue for a more expansive and diverse understanding of the biopolitical framework that has been termed the Capitalocene.