My new monograph, The Book of Improvement: Media Environments in the Global Enlightenment, will be published by Yale University Press in the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History in November 2026. “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, technology, infrastructure, morality, literature, language, the law, the arts, the sciences, the self. Rather than understanding improvement as a set of ideas, I show 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, I show 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.

My exemplary figure for what I am calling the “book history of improvement” is the Romantic-era landscape gardener Humphry Repton, who invented the form of the before-and-after illustration to expand the concept of improvement even as he worked in its traditional realm, the renovation of houses and gardens. By illustrating improvement in the form of the before-and-after drawing, Repton’s books made environmental transformations seem easy and even inevitable—in the process, making improvement graspable as a concept.