When ‘improvement’ is a downside

The Fens, an area of low marshes and farmland on England’s east coast and the subject of James Boyce’s latest book, might seem a long way from colonial Tasmania and Melbourne, the subjects of previous books from Boyce, but what links them all is Boyce’s concern with the dispossession of Indigenous people, the transformation of rich lands in the name of progress, and the agency of Indigenous people often minimised in historical accounts.