The Book of Improvement

How the concept of improvement came to dominate and direct British thinking about social change during the eighteenth century

Improvement had a specific environmental meaning during the eighteenth century, referring primarily to the development of land. Its application, however, grew to encompass almost every arena of social life: agriculture, trade, infrastructure, morality, literature, language, the law, the arts, the sciences, the self. Rather than understanding improvement as a set of ideas, Rachael King shows for the first time how the concept developed in and through new forms of early interactive media, such as before-and-after flaps, printed diaries, and magazines and periodicals.

While we now understand improvement as generally "making things better," the idea played a key role in colonial, racist, sexist, and classist undertakings in the period, as colonized peoples, the enslaved, women, and the working classes were sometimes forcibly "improved." Drawing on extensive archival research and bringing together methodologies of media studies, literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the digital humanities, King shows how certain genres of writing elicit a level of interaction that blurs the boundaries of the book, enabling the transformation of an idea into a cultural keyword.