Resource Landscapes: Introducing a Heuristic Framework

This special issue critically reexamines the terms “resources” and “landscapes.” The introduction proposes “resource landscapes” as a heuristic framework to challenge these terms’ modern and Western-centric valences using a historical lens. To illustrate this methodology, we apply this heuristic framework to a series of case studies focused on mining in early modern Europe and the colonial Americas. The special issue as a whole focuses on the complex relationships among nature, human bodies, and landscapes; it puts in dialogue material and cultural histories of early modern Europeans and the peoples they colonized with studies of the colonization and transformation of the natural world.