The move toward visualising the earth as an orb or globe put peoples in their place. While imperial ideologies fomented territorial expansion, identifying certain peoples as natural masters of newly discovered worlds, others warned of the dangers of travel and exposure to other races and cultures. More radically still some sought to abolish private property altogether and build radically egalitarian communities on the most microcosmic scale. This was an era when deabtes about the laws of nations and natural law went hand in hand with emergent anthropology and international law. This project is rooted in disciplines like historical geography and environmental criticism. It ties landscape and literature to law, the rural and political, looking at literary texts and drama considering how people historicised themselves in terms of imperial mission, colonial competition and their different senses of place. The relationship between literature and history is at the heart of how new ways of thinking about community were constructed, subverted, questionned and reinstated.