Framing Nature in Seventeenth-Century English Pamphlets on Jamaica. A Corpus-assisted Discourse Study

In this paper I analyse the English framing of Nature and its resources in a specialised corpus of 17th-century propaganda pamphlets on the occupation and colonization of Jamaica (PonJ), dating from 1655 to 1700 and amounting to 212,000 words. By drawing on Charteris-Black’s definition of frame as a socially shared perspective on something which generates ideologies through its repeated usage (2019, p. 16), I adopt a corpus-assisted methodology in order to identify the most frequent Nature-related words in the corpus and examine their semantic patterns of occurrence through concordance tabs. The quantitative approach is combined with the qualitative one so as to tackle the relationship existing between semantic patterns retrievable from the corpus and aspects of the wider historical and socio-cultural context, including the propaganda purpose of the author and the reception of the target readership. Results show that Nature-related words are principally encoded within a frame of “utility”, “bountifulness” and “domestication” which shape Nature as an ever-lasting resource to be quickly turned into subsistence and export commodities, in line with an anthropocentric worldview. The findings reflect the natural philosophical project of recovering the ‘empire’ of human beings over Nature through colonization. Nature in the Caribbean was represented as a storehouse of new and apparently unlimited natural resources to be studied, (over)used and cultivated. Some deviations from this conceptualization, however, occur and show that by the end of the century, regulations against uncontrolled hunting of local species were put in place with some sense of ‘conservation’ for future generations.