How can people and animals live alongside each other? How should land and resources be distributed in society? People searched for answers to these questions in both literary and built utopias from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and utopian projects were ways of developing and testing out alternative models for society. The new designs for islands, settlements, cities, or mining projects that they contained were generally a response to criticism of contemporary conditions. I aim to show that non-human entities were part and parcel of such projects, though they have often been overlooked. Whether found in literature or implemented in practice, early modern schemes for better collective living are teeming with animals, plants, and minerals—as well as buildings and infrastructure designed to control them. In order to explore these kinds of utopian ecologies, which address humans in their relationships with organisms and infrastructures, I employ an approach based in transnational microhistory. My goal is to understand local utopian projects—whether a book, a mining project, or the founding of a new colonial city—in their global contexts.
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