Fénelon’s moral tale equated civilisation with tidy, industrious agriculture.

Evidence

Wherever Télémaque went in his travels outside Greece, to Thebes, Tyre, and Crete, he found people ‘industrious, patient, hard-working, neat, sober and thrifty’, and enjoying ‘une exacte police’. He found ‘not a single field where the hand of the diligent labourer had not made its mark; everywhere the plough had left its deep furrows: brambles, thorns and all the plants that occupy the earth without profit were unknown’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 348

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how colonial-era translations carried an agrarian ideal where weedy, unprofitable nature functions as the visible sign of backwardness — the boundary-drawing between ‘productive’ and ‘waste’ land.